I know I'm gonna get flamed for this...

[Mr Initial Man]

Most website designers say that frames are useless, but in my website, I use them a lot, mostly because I've run into nothing but trouble with CSS layouts.

So what's wrong with Frames?

[AdamGundry]

I'll try not to flame too much, but I'm sure the others will have a field day with this...

The main problem is accesibility. Frames tend to make your site awkward to navigate for people, especially those using text-based browsers. They can also hinder search engines, both in spidering your content and providing visitors with consistent navigation when they arrive at a deep link from a search engine.

There are also issues such as difficulties for users with small screens/windows - multiple scrolling frames on a page tends to look ugly and restrict ease of use for your site.

I'm sure there are more reasons, but those are the only ones I can think of for the moment. CSS layouts are not hard if you know what you're doing, and you can create an accessible and usable site which degrades gracefully. I won't say frames are universally a bad idea, but they are often used when they are unnecessary.

Adam

[pawky]

frames also prevent effective bookmarking. and from all i have seen from reading anything you can do w/ frames can be accomplished w/ css

[PeOfEo]

frames also conflict with your ability to design. Frame based layouts are generally ugly because you have less control over them, but with a css based layout you hold the paintbrush and the page is the canvas. You can do so much more.

[Mr Initial Man]

What I find frames good for is creating navigation bars. That's pretty much ALL I use it for. (Except on one page where I use it for a fancy graphic).

With frames, your navigation bar stays PUT, while your content can scroll. Unless you bugger around with CSS quite a bit, your navigation will scroll with the rest of your window. (growl)

[PeOfEo]

Originally posted by Mr Initial Man
What I find frames good for is creating navigation bars. That's pretty much ALL I use it for. (Except on one page where I use it for a fancy graphic).

With frames, your navigation bar stays PUT, while your content can scroll. Unless you bugger around with CSS quite a bit, your navigation will scroll with the rest of your window. (growl) But whats the big deal with that? Most users do not find it annoying to have to scroll up a bit to get to a link. If your navigation is long the users now have two scroll bars to worry about if you are using frames. If you want the content to scroll independent of the navigation you might consider having a box with a scroll bar on it and sticking the content in that.
<div style="overflow:auto; width:500px; height:500px;"> This content will scroll when it gets too big</div>

[Mr Initial Man]

No, but having a navigation bar that's always on the screen DOES make it a bit easier for whoever's going through my pages.

*Grins* Besides, if a website designer uses frames here, there, and on granny's rocking chair, it's always fun to see a HTML purist's head explode. (Can hear webdeveloper looking at his website: "FRAMES! AAAAAH! I'm melting, I'm melting!")

That, and frames are just easier to code anyways. Yes, I'm lazy.

[PeOfEo]

Frames are not easier to code, if you think that you should try laying out your sites with css and xhtml. With frames you have to code a page for content, a page for the menu, here a page there a page every where another page. If you do it with xhtml and css you keep the layout in a separate file basically so all of yout pages get reduced to nothing more the content and a few structural tags. You can even streamline it more with a server side include for your menu and for other things that will be on every page such as header and footer. So you would only have a few lines of per file and some content.

All frames do is annoy the user who wants to bookmark your page and annoy the user on an audio braille browser who cannot access your page.

[pawky]

Originally posted by Mr Initial Man
What I find frames good for is creating navigation bars. That's pretty much ALL I use it for. (Except on one page where I use it for a fancy graphic).

With frames, your navigation bar stays PUT, while your content can scroll. Unless you bugger around with CSS quite a bit, your navigation will scroll with the rest of your window. (growl)

I have seen that done w/ css as well and it worked perfectly well. I dont have the link atm because its on the other computer. But it is able to be done

[AdamGundry]

It's easy to do that in CSS, even easier than with frames. Unfortunately, a certain proprietary markup translator (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/) is incapable of rendering CSS correctly, so a workaround (http://devnull.tagsoup.com/fixed/) is needed.

Adam

[Mr Initial Man]

Originally posted by PeOfEo
With frames you have to code a page for content, a page for the menu, here a page there a page every where another page.

And this doesn't happen if you replace frames with CSS when the content page changes?

Not only that, but say I replace my main page frames with CSS layouts.

Instead of having one page for my sidebar, I have a sidebar on *Think* 8 different pages, because I have 8 different content page.

On that thought, Frames also takes up a bit less space than CSS layouts.

With Frames, if my frameset was more than 1 or 2 kb, either I've got Meta tags up the wazoo, or SOMEONE was having fun nesting framesets.

(BTW, my frameset's not all that big)

So, I have my scrollbar, my title pages, and my content pages.

With CSS layouts, I'd have my title pages in with my content page, yes. I'd ALSO have to code my scroll bar into EVERY content page, set up each page with the needed divs, and THEN I have to deal with my frames.css file (streeeeeeeeeeeetch).

[Stephen Philbin]

Originally posted by Mr Initial Man
I'd ALSO have to code my scroll bar into EVERY content page, set up each page with the needed divs, and THEN I have to deal with my frames.css file (streeeeeeeeeeeetch).

Not really no. Any sensible person would just use includes.

Or if for some reason includes are not available, copy and paste will do fine. It's highly unlikely though that if a site is large enough to warrant includes, that it would be on a server incapable of includes.

[Mr Initial Man]

Unless, of course, you're using a free host, which may have all SORTS of restrictions. Including being incapable of includes.

And it's also possible that the designer of a web page has no idea how to do it... *Cough*John-David Kraaikamp*Cough*

[Stephen Philbin]

Exactly. If a site is on a free host then it's hardly going to be a large scale site then is it.

[Mr Initial Man]

Not necessarily...

You can do a LOT with 100 megs, and 0catch gives that for free. They don't let you use includes, though.

[MstrBob]

http://t35.com/hosting.html

http://firewebx.com/

http://www.brinkster.com/Hosting/Educational.aspx

http://www.coolfreepages.com/

[Mr Initial Man]

Furnation ain't bad, but it's a bit specific about your page's them. And it's free, too. Personally, I dun think 20 megs of free space is all that bad. AAAAND... No ads, either! *Dancedancedance* I'll ask them if they support includes...

Until then, I think I'll stick with my frames.


By the way, I hope nobody's pissed off at me for bringing this up. Just so many people tell me to "lose the frames," and I really don't see a reason why.

[steelersfan88]

Let me just tell you what I've read so far on this thread. If I was judging the debate, well ...

frames would win because you've yet to prove a reason that can be backed by CSS. The only thing claimed against frames so far has been the accessibility.

And Adam said himself, because IE renders CSS differently/incorrectly/its-own-way, the CSS method is not accessible, so you've really no argument yet. It isn't quite hard to make an argument on the topic, you've just left a bunch, and bunch out ...

[Paul Jr]

Originally posted by steelersfan88
because IE renders CSS differently/incorrectly/its-own-way, the CSS method is not accessible
I don’t know about it being inaccessible — just because IE sucks does not make CSS inaccessible. In fact, nothing that I know of makes CSS inaccessible. I have three big beefs with frames:

You cannot, no matter how hard you try, bookmark a framed page
IMO, they are ugly. The scrollbars, the fact that I have to have my mouse inside the frame to scroll it (I don’t find the fact that the nav [or whatever else] stays put while I scroll to be anything special; it’s actually kind of annoying)
Ever go through Google and end up on a page that has no navigation or header? I have, many times.

Frames aren’t necessarily inaccessible (I have learned it is possible for them to be accessible), but how many people do you know that know this, or know how to keep frames from being completely inaccessible?

[Stephen Philbin]

You may find yourself to be a more preferable host. It depends on your needs really. You can set your own PC to act as a server. Thus giving you all the storage and features you could ever want. Although the server will only be up 24/7 if you keep your PC on 24/7 and you would need to learn to set up and maintain it.

I'm doing it myself now. Well.... I will be as soon as I find a way to get a C compiler onto my box.

[Mr Initial Man]

Well, being my own host is NOT a good idea for me, since I'm on a dial-up line (which means my page would load rather slowly), and online only part of the time.

Why would a navbar that stays put be annoying?

[MstrBob]

Originally posted by Mr Initial Man
Well, being my own host is NOT a good idea for me, since I'm on a dial-up line (which means my page would load rather slowly), and online only part of the time.

Why would a navbar that stays put be annoying?

Because it often gets in the way of the content. Let us remember, we are all not blessed with large screens. For me, on my 800 x 600 sized screen, each pixel counts. If I want to see you're navigation, I'll look at it. If I scroll, I wish it to disappear.


Most Use button on the internet:

Back Button.


The point is, that I found that most users find frames to be annoying. They're up there, next to those annoying navigation boxes that follow you up and down the screen. Plus, generally speaking, they tend to show the web designer as look very amateurish. Considering their inaccessibility, un-searchengine friendliness, and their un-userfriendliness, they're pretty much antiquated. And for good reason, I might add. The few occasions where I've encountered frames on a professional website have been if I'm using a web app that adequately requires frames to function. But for a normal website, no. Look, many users dislike them. That alone should be reason enough.

[Mr Initial Man]

I'm guessing I should have just kept my mouth shut on the subject, then?

[chrismartz]

does anyone know of any free ASP hosts that don't have ads and allow you to ust ASPEmail or the like?

[PeOfEo]

Originally posted by sirhcchris3
does anyone know of any free ASP hosts that don't have ads and allow you to ust ASPEmail or the like? I know plenty of for pay ones that do. Webmatrixhosting.net used to let you do all of that for asp.net, but they closed up shop for free hosting. They were doing a crappy job so ms stopped cutting them checks and now they are not sponsored hosting anymore.