to frame or not to frame

pohopo

So what does everyone feel about frames? I usually always looked down on frames as they look tacky and are hard to work with. And since it is one of the first things you learn in any intro web class i associate it with beginners. However, the other day I saw a very slick and well created site that used frames. So now i am thinking maybe i should not be so hard on frames and give it a second chance.

Elizabeth

I try to avoid them at all costs unless the client insists on them.

JPnyc

I think they get a bad rap. You can make them seamless and they do cut load time when you have a repetitive nav. Even if it's an include it's still being rendered again for nothing. Frames only reload that which absolutely requires reloading.

inerte

10 years of web development and the only time I used frames was for an app that compares two databases. The "source" db is displayed on the left, "target" on the right and the SQL statements on the bottom.

LordShryku

Frames can be very well done, but in most cases they make me want to take icepicks to my eyes. In my own code, I try to avoid them.

goldbug

Just for fun, browse a frames site with Lynx. Now, imagine yourself as someone with vision or mobility impairments, enough to require assistive device(s) (assuming you don't already fall into this group)...imagine how "fun" it must be to use a frames site then.

JPnyc

Imagine yourself a user on dialup, or wireless anywhere internet, and you're connected at about 33kbps. How thrilled would you be to have to load your pages header, with image and navigation, everytime you clicked a link?

goldbug

JPnyc wrote:
Imagine yourself a user on dialup, or wireless anywhere internet, and you're connected at about 33kbps. How thrilled would you be to have to load your pages header, with image and navigation, everytime you clicked a link?

If done properly, these items do not add substantial byte-size to a page, as most imagery would/should be in CSS, and cached by the browser. Compared to the number of "fresh" banner ads that reside on many pages... I'd think I'd be more pissed about the adverts wasting my pipe than anything else. 🙂

JPnyc

What if your page has no adverts? I don't use dialup often, quite a fast BB connection at home, but I do have wireless anywhere for my laptop and it's DOG slow. In fact dialup is faster. I can code a page in less time than it takes to load one. When I'm using that, everything extra that needs to be rendered is like another tooth being pulled.

Merve

Instances in which to use frames:

a header image that is repeated on every page of the site
a very long navbar
a navbar with lots of images
comparaisons
pissing people off 😃

Instances in which not to use frames:

every other instance!

Well, maybe not every other instance. Frames can be used well, but most of the time, they're just a pain in the ass.

davidjam

I wonder what ever happened to xframes? We had a thread last year where the poster was attempting to target a frame via header. It doesn't work, unfortunately.

Goldbug. What's this you say about CSS images being cached? Aren't all images cached? :bemused:

goldbug

davidjam wrote:
Goldbug. What's this you say about CSS images being cached? Aren't all images cached? :bemused:

Bad wording on my part. Intended to say that both CSS and images are cached, and that a majority of "header" and "repetitive decoration" elements are usually best kept in the CSS file(s), keeping the transferred markup to a minimum.

TheDefender

I keep my cache at 1MB so very little gets cached on my machine, but since I have a fractional T1 in my home office and am running full 802.11G with speed boost, and I never dialup, it doesn't matter to me anyhow... 😉

Weedpacket

Nah, you use Javascript to pull down the bits that change from one page to the next, and .innerHTML them all in their respective <div>s.

Jason_Batten

JPnyc wrote:
Imagine yourself a user on dialup, or wireless anywhere internet, and you're connected at about 33kbps.

You would be the first person to time travel BACK IN TIME 😃

Or you live in a 3rd world country where mac have a market 😉

Nah, I always build super fast 56k friendly sites... well okay I just cant do images :o

Frames, tried it once... inline style... never again. Frames shite me to tears when ever I surf on a framed site... you can always tell... horrible things. I don't know if I remember the frame tags, I learnt them, never used them.

Long navbar, just use text or css rollover or just not have long navbars...

planetsim

I dont use Frames unless its for an Administration Area, however I am trying to get them to just ordinary CSS/Div Layouts.

vaaaska

I'm all for frames when they are used appropriately.

I know that a number of web apps use frames...for the purpose of setting variables in one frame and then allowing the other frames to access them via javascript. It saves loading and reloading variables.

The day that CSS finally supports target for divs frames tags will be dead...same with iframe. It will be a glorious day for dev geeks.

Along the same lines to this question (because I still find myself asking this all the time)...to Flash or not to Flash?

Jason_Batten

I don't get it. You can create layout with css using dev tags yes but you still have to arrange the dev tags and edit them. Yah might as well just use basic table layout, its much easier IMO. I just fill my paragraph tags to the max using css.

Tables & CSS is the way to go. I see nothing special about the dev tag... happy to be proven wrong and shown what is so great about'em. Less browser issues when using tables.

JPnyc

Flash is ok for window dressing, but not much else, although even much of those eye-candy things can be done with DHTML. But until SE spiders learn to crawl flash, NEVER use it for navigation or text content. Just use it for eye candy, if you must use it

planetsim

Hopefully this post doesnt start a Table v Div (Yes Div not Dev 😉) war.

Tables werent made for designing, basically back in the day they were used for tabular data eventually developers abused the use of Tables by thinking that it would be great to use them for Design eventually this became the mainstream use for tables.

The reason for the browser compatibility issues is IE (I think ive started it), IE doesnt support CSS correctly so hacks are required probably why CSS / DIV layouts are still taking there time on the web. Now tables may seem like the easy way to fix this problem. But what happens when you want a 2 Column Layout and you have a 3 Column Layout? Yes thats right you need to re-code all them pages + CSS if there is any, while a correctly implemented DIV / CSS site will only need the CSS fixed, CSS ZenGarden is probably the best example of Div/CSS working correctly content is seperated from design so we can have multiple CSS Themes as they have.

There are a few major sites preparing Yahoo has started but it still has quite a bit to go, AOL is probably the only Major site that I am aware of that is Div/CSS.