Perhaps this is old school, but do Straight Dopers remember the early days of the internet when one would commonly see a pop-up dialog box (or such) saying “Do you want to view in frames?” OR “Do you want to print in frames?” I can’t recall exactly - memory’s fading. But…
a) Whatever happened to asking about “frames”?
b) Is there a simple way to print an article from a website without all the junk, like ads or side topics shown in boxes adjacent the main article? I seem to recall printing (or, not printing?) frames would avoid the side junk. Other than cut-and-paste of the desired text into Word, is there a simple way to avoid printing everything shown on a website?
Seems to depend on the specific site. Sometimes I’ll do a Control-F search for “print” and hope whoever designed the page added a “print this article/page/recipe” button for just this reason.
Also, I have no idea where I saw it or if it was just specific to some website, but I know I’ve seen something meant to clean up a website to make it more ‘print ready’. I’d imagine there’s browser extensions for it.
Here’s the first extension I found that does what you’re looking for (I think). I can’t vouch for it beyond saying I installed it, pulled up a random website with lots of ‘extra’ stuff on it and the print preview was considerably cleaned up and you can then go in and delete anything you don’t want.
I’m sure there’s better ones (and probably worse ones), but for being the first one I tried, seemed decent enough.
It is true that frames are no longer used in HTML5, but they do have their replacement: iframes. They stand for inline frames, and let you essentially load one webpage inside of another—albeit with security restrictions.
These, however, are not used as much as frames, as they generally aren’t necessary for regular website design. They’re more useful for, say, embedding a video in a page, or adding some other service from provided another website, without it having access to the entire page.
As for why no one asks if you want to load iframes? They just don’t have the problems frames had, and you can’t (easily) accidentally load just the iframe without the rest of the page. They were designed from the ground up not to need to be disabled.