DACS Web Design Special Interest Group

DACS
Resource
Center
Ives Manor
(lower level)
198 Main Street Danbury.

For information contact:
Annette van Ommeren
(aka "Anna Collens")

Join Us!
Just show up or send an email so you can be notified of upcoming meetings.

Frames - pros and cons
Love them or hate them - frames have a place, and can be used to advantage for certain types of web page designs.
Advantages:
Can keep a section of a web page always visible. Usually used for navigation bar, company name/logo or footnotes, etc. Can easily update/change other sections. Only pertinent page has to reload saving download time.
Disadvantages:
Search engines don’t like them. Cannot bookmark (add-to-favorites) the individual pages within the frameset. Older browsers don’t like them. (less critical these days) Used less and less.
A framed page is a webpage that appears to be one page, but is made up of several documents. Some will remain static, others can be changed by clicking links from the static pages.
If a "page" contains 3 pages, there are 4 html documents. One html document has to “hold” the 3 visible pages. At least 1 frame window has to be flexible, but others can be set to pixel size. Each frame window should to be named – to enable linking from one to another.
Framesets can only have rows or colums. To divide a row or column, a nested frameset can be inserted. Layout of a 3-page frameset: Outside frameset with 2 rows (gray). Nested frameset with 2 colums (blue) inside the lower row of the outer frameset. Each window contains a seperate html page. The links in the "links" page can change the html document in the Main page window.

See it in action: 3-page frameset \|\| Nested frameset
The "target" options for linking from pages within the frameset: Default options are: target= _self : loads the linked document in the same frame or window as the link. This target is the default. _parent : loads the linked document in the parent frame or parent window of the frame that contains the link. If the frame containing the link is not nested, then the linked document loads in the full browser window. _top : loads the linked document in the full browser window, thereby removing all frames. _blank : loads the linked document in a new, unnamed browser window.
Targeting the window for linked file:
To make the page open up in a TARGETED window, have to make sure that window is named! Then: < a href=“pagename.htm" target="mainFrame"> Where “mainFrame” is the name of the window you want the page to appear in.
Some web site that make effective use of frames:
http://www.meetingsinmedicine.com	Effective use of a bottom links bar.
http://www.jamesrobinsonpictures.com	Go to the Portfolio for the framesets.
http://titanicmovie.com/past/ tour_index.html	Inovative use of an image with a frameset.
http://www.stink.com/bruce/	Look at the source code for an example of meta tags and alternate (no-frames) content in the <body> section.
http://www.stoneroadstudio.com/ portraits.html	Scrollable bottom window for photo thumbnails.
http://www.corinnelapincohen.com/ flowersbotanicals.htm	Scrollable left window for image thumbnails.
To make sure browsers interpret framed pages correctly, make sure this declaration is placed above the start of the html code of the frameset document. Doctype header for the frameset: < !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Frameset//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">
Search engines don't like framed pages! But there are ways to make sure your site is indexed correctly.
To help search engines list the page, consider adding meta tags to the <head> section of the actual frameset html. (in addition to meta tags of the head sections of the ‘interior’ pages)	< meta name=“keywords” content=“…”> < meta name=“description” content=“…”>
Also add some content to the “no-frames” section of the FrameSet - such as a description of the site and links to alternate pages. This goes between the <body> ... </body> tags, only seen by browsers not able to show a framed page.
To help prevent “inside” pages from being "crawled and indexed by search engines, add the meta tag: < meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
Suggestions..
Don’t use a framed page as an index page. Make sure to include a full URL link to your home page on every framed (interior) page! (Just in case someone opens the page outside a frame) But set that link to: target=_top in case someone clicks it when the page is within a frameset - or the home page will open inside that window.