FRAMES. Why FRAMES would fall from favor. Bookmarks are alive and well, thank you very much.
This is what I was going to mention. In my class on media law and ethics, we talked about copyright in the context of pages with frames. Specifically, using your pages frames as a header, and linking to other site content that will display in your main target frame. It’s like using someone else’s magazine and putting your own cover on it.
More recently, when I do run into (professional) sites that use frames, there is usually a disclaimer when you click a link to an external site. The site will load in a new window (rather than in the same window or a frame) and they make you acknowledge that you understand you are leaving their site.
Is this what we’re talking about when we use the term ‘frames’? This is a fairly cool website for teaching a complicated poem --how would you redesign such a page to contain all the information here? (Principles–I’m not asking anyone to actually redesign this page, just give me an idea what approach a more contemporary web-designer would take.)
Do you really think that page is cool? It hurts to look at it.
Yes, that what people are talking about, although frames-based websites are usually a bit more subtle than that - most often they don’t show the scrollbars (which is in turn often a problem if the content is too big for the frame) and usually don’t show the actual frame bars themselves, or make them repositionable.
What frames-based websites are most often trying to do is implement some form of database or lookup functions, except that the database objects are all pre-formatted HTML pages; click on a menu link in the header frame and the relevant detail is loaded into one of the other frames; a more contemporary approach to achieve the same kind of result would be to store the variable page contents in some kind of real database and have the menu link invoke a server-side script that retrieves the data, crams it into a defined page format and serves it up to the browser. Or something like that, anyway
The rise of content management systems also contributed to the death of frames. Frames were often sued for navigation within a site. In the old days of hardcoded HTML pages, if a webmaster added pages, it would be very difficult to manually change the navigation menu on every subpage. Instead, they created a navigation frame, and just changed that.
Now, with cheap Web hosting that includes PHP scripts and MySQL databases, and the availability of many excellent free, open source content management system scripts, it’s fairly easy for someone to create an advanced Web site with dynamically generated content. Add a section to a site, and the CMS will automatically update the navigation menu that appears on every page; there’s no need to manually edit every page.
Argh! My eyes! My eyes!
Don’t tabs do that, too? (And am I the only one that despises the javascript ‘goback’ thing, or however it’s done, when it’s in a page opened in a tab or from a Google result?)
I’ve actually used that site before. I’m certainly not going to claim that it couldn’t be done in better ways, or that it’s not as ugly as a pair of sweaty balls, but it does actually function in a very specific and effective way. Yes, it does rely on being used in a specific way, which brings us full circle.
No. Every tab maintains its own history and knows what the back button is supposed to do for it.
Not really. If it were as bad as that, how do About.com and Google get away with it without someone suing them?
…until you open a link in a new tab. And if you follow a couple of links, and in the meantime close the parent tab, you can’t get back to the original page by that route.
Tabs are controlled by the end user, so any confusion regarding tab history can usually be traced to user error. Frames are controlled by the coding of the site, which is not the same from site to site, and are confusing [del]and suck sweaty balls[/del]. Back button and bookmarking can be linked to the parent page or any one of the individual frames, and the user can rarely tell which is which.
‘Using things in a different way’ does not equate to ‘user error’. The ‘back button’ is a legacy of non-tabbed browsing, where everything was a linear progression from the previous page to the next. It’s not obselete, and these things tend to die a very long death, but it’s hardly a logical thing to have in a tabbed-browsing environment.
For example…I can hit ctrl-Z several times to step back through typing this reply…the logical thing for the next ctrl-Z would be to take me back to the tab from which this reply-to-message tab was launched.
Not true in FireFox.
If you use the Tab History option, each created tab remembers the URL that it was created from. You can keep hitting back, even beyond the spot where that tab was created – it will take you back to the parent webpage, even if you closed it in the meantime.
The top frame is the biggest waste of space. Using a large font size and full paragraph spaces where a small one line image would suffice is silly. The horizontal scrollbars are also largely unnecessary. When the poem appears, it’s at the top of the page, when it should be in the middle, where the eyes tend to fall. A webpage with instructions and explanations for the layout is inherently a bad webpage. The interface is so counterintuitive, I can hardly figure out what it’s supposed to do. The explanation and help frames could easily be replaced by drop-down, pop-up or tooltip menus, (or hell, another page) or done away with altogether.
Don’t sugarcoat it for me, now.
Nobody’s saying that page is an example of good design. Bear in mind that it was probably put together when a 1024x780 screen was a luxury item. The layout does make more sense if you shrink your window to a smaller size.
Thank you, hadn’t come across that extension before.
Still doesn’t solve the idiotic situation of a result in Google expecting the ‘back’ button to work via the javascript option I mentioned earlier. But that IS just bad design.
The Octagon: applause.
A 5.9 from the Oxford judge.
I think you are misunderstanding me. Tabs are great and are fully compatible with existing conventions like the back button and bookmarking. If a user is confused about where he is active in a tabbed browser environment, it’s his own fault. That’s all.
[hijack]Are you seriously suggesting the elimination of the back button?[/hijack]
Don’t bring bookmarks into it, I’m not talking about them. “It’s the user’s fault” is a lazy argument - the back browser is a linear concept, while tabs are not.
As I hardly ever use mine, I suppose I am. Is it so sacrosanct that I shouldn’t think this? How about a ‘history tree’, which from any current page, shows previous ones, both on this and other tabs, and also other tabs which were opened from those pages? Assuming that the way things work at the moment is the ‘good’ way of doing things will hardly help make things better.