Coding Forum

**drewrockshard** · 02-18-2004, 05:12 PM

Hello Everyone,
I am a 3-year freelance web designe, yet only 17 years old! haha. Anyways I would like to inform to people that frames are a dying tool...

A frameset document is a document that defines one or more frames by using the

Code:

frameset

and

Code:

frame

elements.

THE ADVANTAGE??

The advantage to frames is this: you can present multiple documents into one browser window. For example, you could make a frameset(index.html) and add the following page: a frame on the left side(nav.html) and assign the page links for your navigation links for your website. Then you may have a frame at the top of your document(header.html) inserting an image to make it look like your logo top header part of your site. Then you could make a body frame(body.html) and assign it as the target for your links so that your links target display into the body.html frame. This can get confusing if you don't do this yourself. But this is the only advantage to frames.

THE DISADVANTAGE??

The disadvantage to frames is this: well not really theres alot so lets list em...

From browser to browser (IE, NN, Opera, Mozilla, and Firefox) they dont display the same way causing your users to get annoyed or confused and they click out of your site.
Frame size has a huge factor too. People have different screen resolutions(800 X 600, 1024 X 768, and 1280 X 1024) and frames don't calulate right making your users have to scroll back and forth.
Some browsers (most anyway), do not support the fact of printing. Alot of the browsers just print out a certain page, but not the whole page the user is seeing. It could be the links page, or the body page, or even the header page.
Search engines have a hard time getting a correct search. Like if your site was a frameset and had all the pages as stated above, and you went to google and searched for your site: You click the link for your site and all you get is this page of links. The user is confused and clicks out having a bad, very bad opinion about your site. And you as a web designer is displeased, because you have no, or almost no visitors.
Finally, the last, but certainly not least reason why frames are a dying tool, is the fact that tables are a whole lot cleaner. You can format and display information alot better in tables than in frames.

I really hope this post was useful. I'm also going to post this on the main HTML area of this forum. And thanks for taking the time to read.