I asked someone why anybody would still use frames, and we couldn't think of a good reason. But now I can.

I want to display a report on one of my pages. It will use an html <table> structure, because I'm reporting tabular data, in tabular format. ( Don't boo me off stage please! ) So far so good, and everything works great.

Only sometimes the report takes more than a page, and people will have to scroll downward to read all of it. When this happens, the table's header row scrolls off the page, upwards. And then the data looses context, becomes a lot harder to make sense of. I'd like to fix the header at the top of the page always, no matter where you are in the report. This is pretty easy to do in Excel, and I think people have come to expect it.

So then how would one accomplish this on a web page? I have a bad feeling javascript is going to have to be involved, and that it would be somewhat complicated, am I right? Would I be better off using an i-frame in this situation? Or am I making things out to be harder than they really are?

There is nothing inherently wrong with iframe. For special situations, it is perfectly okay to use them. I think, the primary complain against iframe in pratcical situations is that they are not search engine friendly. If you are not worried about that here, iframe is fine to accomplish what you are asking. Other than that, yes, you will need to use JS or dhtml to accomplish a static menu. Which is just as bad from SE point of view and many times more complicated.

Tables were MEANT for tabular data, so it's perfectly acceptable to use them that way.

There is a way to include external html in an html page WITHOUT iframes:
http://www.aplus.co.yu/web-dev/inser...her-html-page/

If I recall, in the past I've used:

overflow: auto

in my CSS to achieve a similar effect as an iframe would.

I don't think the original poster is looking for a solution to add external files to his page. He wants a static header or menu at the top of the page that always remains always static at the same place so it's never out of the view of the users.

My 2 cents...

I wouldn't use an i-frame. Its not necessary.

If you were going to use an i-frame your header data would have to reside in a different document then your table data. I would put the header in one div and the data in another - then style with css. The overflow:auto would work well for the data layer (as stated above). Set this layer to a fixed height - the user can scroll through the records while the header layer stays right above it. Make sense?