I'll start of by saying I am by far not a fan of frames and in general despise their use on websites. However, I'm thinking that frames is what I need to do what I want with this website. The design is currently in progress, but I figure I better get on the ball with this part before I get too far.

What I want to do is have another website visible in my design on my domain. The externally hosted cart will be viewed in the white space of my layout.

Is that making sense? Should I be using frames (<shudder>) and if so, what is the best way to implement them into this layout.

You could try to use a PHP include inside a div with overflow: scroll; styling, to give it the frame 'look'. Ideally, there would be an XML file containing the content that you could parse and style yourself. You had better check and see.

- Steve

You can use PHP include for an external website?

I don't think you can because I just tried and it breaks the site. I also do not want scrolling.

Oh, sorry about that. I forgot about the include function's strict limitations. Have you checked for an XML file yet?

- Steve

I'm guessing you don't have control over the design of the cart. If you do I'd probably give the cart a design like the site and just link to it.

Assuming you can't alter the cart design enough then frames might be your solution. Yes, shudder. Otherwise see if the cart has an API so you can pull the data you need into your site instead of having to use their page.

Ok, I figured it out.

The websites cart system permits the use of iFrames on an external site, so that's what I've worked in. I read somewhere on this forum that you can't use iFrames to link external, but this seems to work. It took me forever to find the appropriate information on the cart's website, but I think everything is in order now.

BabyHerp

Thank you both!

Use divs, in HTML 5.0, i heard, frames and framesets are going out and will not be used anymore. but iframes, as far as I understand, will stay in use..

When you use this all of this. So, my decision for using frame please you don't use frame in your project.

Only frames you should ever use are iframes. Otherwise, find a different solution please! Frames don't always display as intended, and often look crappy.

That is a really cute website. I wish I knew MORE about frames. I was just talking to someone this morning about them but neither of us know a whole lot about frames

That is a really cute website. I wish I knew MORE about frames. I was just talking to someone this morning about them but neither of us know a whole lot about frames

You don't NEED to know more about frames, you should NOT be using them, they are absolutely awful. There are other ways to do things that don't require frames and will not 1 - slow down your site, or 2- ruin your search engine visibility - among other things.
http://godbit.com/article/why-are-frames-bad

Here's something I'd like to add to the discussion: IFRAMES are awesome!
Actually read it before you start to go around saying how useful they are. Iframes do have some purposes, but most users shouldn't ever need them.

Iframes can be quite useful.... when used properly.

Regular frames on the other hand: I say NEVER EVER use them. I think most people would agree with me on that.

Does that mean that if i am not interested on having the information indexed, can I use a frame with no major issues?

If that is indeed your purpose, not sure why.., then why not use robots.txt and block the search engines from viewing that page or directory? Frames won't completely destroy your SEO. Flash might, but currrently Adobe and Google are working together to try and improve the crawl of Flash websites.

@wayfarer: Thanks for the link. It was an interesting read

Cheers