The use of frames
The use of "frames" in a website fell from fashion some years ago and is now much frowned upon by most webpage designers. Yet frames are a feature that has been standardised by the World Wide Web consortium and that provides a very useful subdivision of the display area so why so many furrowed brows? Few if any of the plethora of Content Management systems which are now available cater at all for frames so their rehabilitation is probably a lost cause and therefore just the sort of campain which we like here at Outwits.net.
The relative sizes of the four, yes four, frames used for this website can be changed at any time by dragging one or more of the three frame borders.
Frame contents:
- Of the four frames the top one displays navigational menus.
- The frame in which you are reading this displays the full contents of a main page.
- When the background colour of the left frame, or side-bar , matches that of this frame, which it generally does, this indicates that the left frame is displaying a summary of, or introduction to, at least one main page, though not necessarily the main page currently being displayed
- Alternatively, when the background colour of the left frame matches that of the menu frame, the former is displaying expanded information about a menu, though again not necessarily the menu currently visible.
- The fourth frame, the footnote frame, is below the left frame and by default is pretty much empty and of minimal height. It is used both for footnotes to main pages and for larger versions of small fotos which appear in the flogs or tales of adventure.
The contents of one frame are not automatically updated to keep them relevant to the other frames as this cannot be achieved when using only HTML and CSS for the creation of these webpages. Whilst this simple behaviour allows the reader to have a mixture of information displayed if desired, it also invites confusion. This problem is alleviated by providing ample links in pages, summaries and footnotes for the synchronizing of neighbouring frames.
Frames: the advantages...
- Frames allow you to scroll through some parts of a website while keeping other information static without having separate windows with their wastage of screen space
- Resizable frames, as used here, facilitate easier adjusting of relative display areas than does the moving and resizing of separate windows.
... and the disadvantages
- In most browsers the retracing of webpage visiting within a set of frames is lost if the "frameset" is reloaded or replaced by another set or single page.
- Where a webpage is visited through a search engine listing the page will be loaded without its frameset. If the page is not well annotated it might consequentally be difficult to visit related pages of the associated website.