Webmasters, talk me out of a monster frameset

In My Humble Opinion
1

So, I had to make and HTML version of a Flash site. Had to be simple, simple HTML. But I absolutely had to maintain a graphic layout. Turned out a helluva lot more difficult than I thought because of three elements that must line-up… and still look awesome no matter what size screen and resolution you’re using. The graphic elements are also infinite, disappearing off the top bottom and sides.

Tried lotsa stuff, CSS almost did the trick… but nah, couldn’t get it to work…

So for shits-'n-giggles, I put together a horrendous nested frameset combo.

And lo’ it worked!

I have one main frameset of three - each of those is a framset of three, the only scrolling frame (which is the content frame and the only one that changes) is smack in the middle of this zany checkerboard.

So, before I go and tell my boss “hey, check this out! I got it to work in almost pure HTML!” Tell me why it’s a bad idea (forgetting about search engine reasons for the moment).

Frames are always getting pooh-poohed as be so passé, they are often frowned upon.

Truthfuly, I wasn’t planning on keeping it like this. But after goofing around for several hours, I now feel the need to to justify dumping it.

2

Other than the search engine non friendly , I have no idea why this really is applicable anymore. Okay first I can understand the handicapped folks, they use a browser thats intergrated with a text to speech application that basically does with sound what sighted people do with optics.

But other than that , if someone is Still using a webbrowser that does not support frames , for what ever reason , then tough noogies.

The downside to using Frames , is the crossplatform problem. Simply because as you probably know , MS explorer seems to render pages differently than mozilla , Konq , Opera and so forth, a framed site may end up looking horrible. On a hobby site ,this may be fine , personally I am happy with mine, and am not worried about the cross platform problem, but CSS is supposed to solve this ,while keepin the original look of html frames.

Once I put in the noframes option on the index page , my page came up “okay” in lynx , but basically for the blind folks , they are not gonna see how horrible it is , so they can concentrate your content.

The funny thing is that everytime I see someone mentioning frames and how they should be condemmed to the seventh level of hell, it sorta reminds me of what happens when you ask about using a goto statement in a computer program. Alot of sputtering and stating , YOU JUST DONT DO IT , lol.

If the boss is happy , fine , if not , redo it. But I think a framed html page can be just as good a CSS one, but obviously the professional coders will be along to send you to re-educa…er set you on the proper path :slight_smile:

Declan

3

If you have any way of automatically generating the content from a set of templates, I would reccomend trying to achieve the same thing in tables instead. For a lot of big data presentation projects, I have used frame-like layouts that were really just tables that linked to a zillion other static files. I woud write a program to use an HTML template to create the thousands of files from the set of data.

4

Frames cut into screen space. I.e. you’ll end up utilizing 1/16th of the screen area.

Cross-browser interoperability, however, is less of an issue with frames than most common design elements (divs, tables, css) used instead of frames.

5

Frames are like big words. There is a lot of snobbery against them, then again they are often poorly used or used unnecessarily.

If you can use something simpler than frames, then do so. Realise however, that the same rule applies to flash, java… even css and tables.

There is a flipside to this. Sometimes a big word is the best option. Same goes for frames. Keep the frameset as clean as you can and try to avoid scrollbars. No worries.

There’s no point having a satisfyingly clean (to the author) HTML document with nothing more complex than a line break tag, if it looks like shite.

My 2c.

6

I’m a webmaster, and I say it’s worth working at it with tables and spacers to get the thing working without frames. It’s not just “it’s not done” - there are countless reasons not to use framesets, the biggest of which is linking to an individual page.

If you don’t mind a slight delay when loading, you can put the repeating menu and navigation elements into external JavaScript files that look like:


document.write('Your HTML goes here');
document.write('One line of JS for each line of HTML');

and call the file/s from within the HTML with


<SCRIPT src="./scriptname.js"></SCRIPT>

As a rule of thumb, don’t use repeating graphics - the problem with them is that they repeat (duh), and therefore look awful on larger screen sizes.

7

Well, I did try it with tables. Believe me. I was able to get a decent version (pretty dang close), but the frames one does work far better.

I am still fiddling around with the tabled version though since it is my first preference. The problem with the tables is that there must be an element whose abosulte position value is along the bottom. The content is still in the middle so I’m having a pesky time getting the smack-in-the-middle content to scroll properly and look right on a variety of different screen sizes.

I actually just put my table cells into their own pages to create the framesets. It’s just getting the center-cell content to present itelf properly nomatter what the screen size - very annoying.

Jjimm the repeating graphics actually were designed for the large screen. I’m still working on the table version though - for accessibility issues (like Declan mentioned above).

Could you elaborate a bit? I don’t quite understand what you mean. The content area is consistent on all the platforms I’ve tested this on. (Roughly 740 px across) no matter what size the screen.

CSS with the table almost gets the right results, but not quite…

8

Crayons , can you post a link to the site , if possible

Declan

9

Er… I’m afraid no, actually, due to a privacy issue thing that could conceivably blow an occasional StraighDoper’s identity…

Lemme ask, perhaps I can e-mail you directly.

10

I just sent you an email , with some screenshots that you might find interesting

Declan

11

Thanks. Very interesting indeed. (And hard to tell the two apart sometimes.)