Ihate Frames Club

Members include...

Frames add nothing in the way of hyperness, muddle the page=document metaphor and are often very, very badly coded.

Moreover they are ugly, browsers do not provide handy ways to navigate them, and they violate the concept that HTML describes the content, not the representation of a document. They should die.

Chowhound also hates people leaving his site. Completely screwed up the history of my browser. I on the other hand belong to the IloveFramesClub -- AndreSlabber

[discussion moved to MyWebsiteLearningExperience]

On http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9612.html JakobNielsen explains why he thinks that frames suck.

I don't like them, but I gave in and used them here: http://home.sprintmail.com/~wconrad/refactoring-live/junit/index.html. These are some of the slides for the RefactoringLive presentation. The frame with an index of the slides seemed like a very natural way to navigate through the presentation. But I don't like frames. Sigh. So... How can I get rid of the frame and keep the easy navigation? Suggestions, please.

Do you like <iframe>s? There are some problems (such as WikiTransclusions?) that only they easily fix... -- PCP

If I knew what iframes did then I could say yes or no. I'll check my AnimalBook for HTML and see what they do different. Thanks for the hint.

Iframes are totally pants because they are IE specific. There has to be a more compatible way of doing TransClusion.

If they are totally IE specific, then why does the http://www.w3.org/ site mention them? (I tried to figure out if they've been promoted to a standard...)

(But the problem with non-IFRAME transclusions is you must re-invent your page's frame system, proactively, depending on whether a given page will have frames or not. It's just very rough code to write.) -- PCP

IFRAMEs are good. They add a lot in terms of hyperness: they are the only decent way to implement TransClusions on the web and they are extremely late in coming. Beforehand, the only things you could seriously transclude were graphics.

As for the HTML describing the content not the style of a document, that has never been true. In fact, the web is so fluffy because HTML is such a style-centric standard. Compared to the http://usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?GopherProtocol, HTML is entirely style.

Lately, HTML4 Strict has tried to separate content from style, I agree. However, a TransClusion is non-stylistic; it is entirely content. So, your point is moot, especially since IFRAMEs were introduced in HTML4 despite the claim that they are InternetExplorer only. I mean, if you are using a non-compliant browser, that's your problem.

By the way, I don't use frames because they aren't LynxFriendly (yet) and the existing browsers have terrible UIs. That doesn't mean frames are bad; it means the browsers are bad. There is a useful distinction there. (i.e. if frames were really bad independent of browsers, if you improve the browsers, frames would still suck. Which they don't.) -- SunirShah