Frames in Web Design

[dorayme]

Under
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/index/elements.html
It shows it is not Deprecated, so it is OK to use it

Do you read and study a little some of the URLs that have been given to
you in this thread? Beauregard T. Shagnasty, Raymond Schmit and I have
given you a few choice ones. Are you an Indian Luigi? Are you Luigi in
India? Did you get fed up of conducting a one man business in Sweden?
What is going on?

 

[Ganesh]

Do you read and study a little some of the URLs that have been given to
you in this thread? Beauregard T. Shagnasty,  Raymond Schmit and I have
given you a few choice ones. Are you an Indian Luigi? Are you Luigi in
India? Did you get fed up of conducting a one man business in Sweden?
What is going on?

If browsers, print buttons and other front end tools currently have
problems adhering to standards, it is their headache to standardize
them. You cannot stop breathing just because there's swine flu in the
air. Or, write to W3C to make that element "Obsolete", if they have
not done it yet, there should be experts who should be thinking
otherwise.

 

[Andy Dingley]

is there any point in learning about Frames in a web design course?

No. There is some point to learning their disadvantages. Learning
their subtleties from a sense of completeness is important after your
web design course, when you're doing postgrad studies towards your
Aspirational Jukka diploma.

Further than this though, if any particular course was still seeing
fit to teach frames, then I'd question the value of the whole course
and it is probably best avoided entirely. There are any number of web
courses out there, the trick is to avoid the bad ones.

My only recommendation is the Head First series of books: Head First
Web Design and Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML are both good books,
teaching good practices.

 

[Andy Dingley]

For a website?  Probably not.

For a Web based Application?  Maybe so.

Web apps imply dynamic server-side behaviour, so you know you'll have
access to far better approaches.

Even static SSI is enough to make frames unnecessary. Even if you
don't have that, offline pre-processing is a generally better approach
than frames.

 

[Travis Newbury]

Web apps imply dynamic server-side behaviour, so you know you'll have
access to far better approaches.
Even static SSI is enough to make frames unnecessary. Even if you
don't have that, offline pre-processing is a generally better approach
than frames.

In "perfect world land" I would agree, but in "reality land" I
disagree.

Many (most based on my personal experience as Siemens, ATT, Verizon,
WorldCom, and a few others) corporate web based applications use
frames or I-frames. If the student wants to know how it is currently
being done, then they need to learn frames because they are currently
being used. So while what you say is true, what is happening in real
world practice (from my experience) it is probably a good thing to
learn frames with Web based applications.

 

[Harlan Messinger]

In "perfect world land" I would agree, but in "reality land" I
disagree.

Many (most based on my personal experience as Siemens, ATT, Verizon,
WorldCom, and a few others) corporate web based applications use
frames or I-frames.

My first clue that this information was, at best, outdated, if not
outright false, was your mention of WorldCom, which has not existed as
such for a couple of years, nor is there a website at www.worldcom.com.
A look at several pages on the websites of each of the other companies
you mentioned showed no use of a FRAME tag, and only the Verizon pages I
looked at have any IFRAMEs, but this appears to be mostly for the
purpose of embedding single-pixel GIFs from DoubleClick, not for
implementing a page template or navigation.

 

[Travis Newbury]

My first clue that this information was, at best, outdated, if not
outright false, was your mention of WorldCom, which has not existed as
such for a couple of years, nor is there a website atwww.worldcom.com.

Many of Worldcom's processes and applications still exist as Verizon.
So you are mistaken.

A look at several pages on the websites of each of the other companies
you mentioned showed no use of a FRAME tag

We are discussing "web applications" not "web sites", so again you
are mistaken.

 

[Harlan Messinger]

Many of Worldcom's processes and applications still exist as Verizon.
So you are mistaken.

No, I am not mistaken that WorldCom no longer exists as such and that
there is no website at www.worldcom.com. "Many of Worldcom's processes
and applications still exist as Verizon" implies nothing to the contrary.

We are discussing "web applications" not "web sites", so again you
are mistaken.

No, I am not mistaken about my observations about the pages that I
looked at. To paraphrase Mandy Patinkin in "The Princess Bride",
regarding the word "mistaken", "I do not think that word means what you
think it means."

 

[Travis Newbury]

No, I am not mistaken that WorldCom no longer exists as such and that
there is no website atwww.worldcom.com. "Many of Worldcom's processes
and applications still exist as Verizon" implies nothing to the contrary.



No, I am not mistaken about my observations about the pages that I
looked at. To paraphrase Mandy Patinkin in "The Princess Bride",
regarding the word "mistaken", "I do not think that word means what you
think it means."

What ever. We were obviously talking about web applications.

 

[Adrienne Boswell]

Gazing into my crystal ball I observed (e-mail address removed)
(Raymond Schmit) writing in
Seriously, get a better editor. Notepad has no syntax highlighting,
line numbering, etc. HTML-Kit (292) has both, and there is a
preprocessor plug in available. There are literally hundreds of plugins
available for the program to help you work in whatever way you want to,
and it's free. I highly recommend it.

I haven't worked with a preprocessor for a long time, but I am pretty
sure you can designate where you want the completed document to go. So
if you had separate directories like /includes and /preflight you could
send the completed files to /completed and then you would have less
chance of confusion.

 

[Travis Newbury]

Whatever, whatever. In an application, everything but the opening page
is context-specific. There is no reason why you would ever need an
address that would allow someone to go directly to the page where, for
example, one's purchase information is displayed for final confirmation,
since such a page would be meaningless outside of the context of a
transaction in progress. Frames, in this case, aren't being used for
navigation.
And yet, on the other hand, there is no reason to use FRAMEs except in
the particular case where the application logic is on a different server
from the web server. IFRAMEs are a different story. But I don't think
they were ever subject to the same criticism as FRAMEs in the first
place. I think lumping them together is a diversion.

I think you re-read your original post and realized that you were
wrong and this is your attempt to regain face.

While there is no REASON to use frames, They are used and the wise web
developer would learn to use them. ESPECIALLY if you are working on
Web apps, and ABSOLUTELY if you are creating SCORM or AICC compliant
web training as both technologies are built on frames.

You last reply seems to agree with that statement. So I guess I was
right after all and you were just bloviating

 

[Harlan Messinger]

I think you re-read your original post and realized that you were
wrong and this is your attempt to regain face.

I think you're making up crap just for the sake of being contentious. As
I already noted, what I said wasn't wrong, and you *were* wrong to say
that it was. WorldCom--good grief, next thing we know, you'll be
referring us to practices on the Sperry Rand website.

 

[Travis Newbury]

I think you're making up crap just for the sake of being contentious. As
I already noted, what I said wasn't wrong, and you *were* wrong to say
that it was. WorldCom--good grief, next thing we know, you'll be
referring us to practices on the Sperry Rand website.

How was I wrong in saying worldcom? Read my post, I said it was "My"
experience, My experience included WorldCom for frame based web
applications. MY experience knows that Verizon continued the same
applications.

What part of "My experiences" do you think YOU know better than me?

 

[dorayme]

What part of "My experiences" do you think YOU know better than me?

There is a widespread view in some circles, usually tucked away in
corners of sandstone buildings in higher education institutions, and it
has been long standing, that one cannot be wrong about how things *seem*
to a person. But not everyone is so sure of this, in spite of some force
in the arguments for it.

One main criticism of this idea is that the description of these hidden
inner states can be wrong because the person uses words in the
descriptions that are used for publicly observable happenings. For
example, I might describe my sensation as one of being of pins and
needles. But later when I experience what real pins and needles on the
skin feel like, I might change my mind about what I felt before and
perhaps change it to a more appropriate and correct and true
description.

So, it is not your experience as such that is being questioned, you
obviously had some inner state or other, possibly when you were smoking
that stuff you smoke, (you know, that stuff you said once) but Harlan is
more concerned about the real world connections you are claiming.

 

[Travis Newbury]

There is a widespread view in some circles, usually tucked away in
corners of sandstone buildings in higher education institutions, and it
has been long standing, that one cannot be wrong about how things *seem*
to a person. But not everyone is so sure of this, in spite of some force
in the arguments for it.

One main criticism of this idea is that the description of these hidden
inner states can be wrong because the person uses words in the
descriptions that are used for publicly observable happenings. For
example, I might describe my sensation as one of being of pins and
needles. But later when I experience what real pins and needles on the
skin feel like, I might change my mind about what I felt before and
perhaps change it to a more appropriate and correct and true
description.

So, it is not your experience as such that is being questioned, you
obviously had some inner state or other, possibly when you were smoking
that stuff you smoke, (you know, that stuff you said once) but Harlan is
more concerned about the real world connections you are claiming.

You know what, I really don't give a shit if Harlan, or anyone else
for that matter, has concerns about my real world connections.

 

[dorayme]

You know what, I really don't give a shit if Harlan, or anyone else
for that matter, has concerns about my real world connections.

You have always been tough that way. Is there any part of you that has
no hair at all?

Btw I think you are right that people who make websites should at least
know about frames. They might be less shocked to know what to do when
they have to take one over from another author.

 

[Travis Newbury]

You have always been tough that way. Is there any part of you that has
no hair at all?

Just one... (but deep inside you knew I would say that)

Btw I think you are right that people who make websites should at least
know about frames. They might be less shocked to know what to do when
they have to take one over from another author.

As I am sure you and literally everyone else in this forum knows, when
ever you take over a job someone else started, their code always
sucks. Mostly because it is not your code. And to the person that
takes over a job you (proverbial you, not you specifically) started,
your code will suck too...

 

[Helpful person]

Hi all,

is there any point in learning about Frames in a web design course?

Thanks,

Andy ;-)

A question to those more knowledgeable than myself. I've used frames
to display PDF files on the screen while maintaining a menu, the PDF
and menu being in different frames. This is a very simple
application. Is this a sensible method or is their a better way to
display the PDF and menu on the monitor?

www.richardfisher.com

 

[Andy Dingley]

Btw I think you are right that people who make websites should at least
know about frames. They might be less shocked to know what to do when
they have to take one over from another author.

Agreed.

But should they learn this on their very first web design course? I
would suggest strongly that they shouldn't. A first course should be
as simple as possible, and it should limit itself to best practices.

 

[Andy Dingley]

I've used frames
to display PDF files on the screen while maintaining a menu, the PDF
and menu being in different frames.  This is a very simple
application.  Is this a sensible method or is their a better way to
display the PDF and menu on the monitor?

Displaying PDFs _in_ something is tricky. The problems are very
similar to those around serving video content.

It's easy to link _to_ a PDF. You config the web server to serve the
correct HTTP content-type and let the client side do the rest.
Simples. This also works for frames and <iframe>s.

Behaviour will usually vary, depending on which content type you
serve. Application/pdf will trigger an embedded viewer (if the browser
has one). Serving a .pdf file as application/octet-stream instead
will be seen as an anonymous binary that the browser can't handle. It
will likely hand it off to the desktop instead, which recognises
the .pdf extension and then fires up the default PDF reader. The PDF
gets displayed, but the reader will be stand-alone, not embedded in
the browser.

A popup window (i.e. JavaScript window.open(), and assuming that your
application is insistent on using a pixel-sized window, sized to the
choice of the server rather than the client (I know this is a bad
idea, but managers don't)) is a bit trickier. You may wish to fill the
page canvas with an <iframe> and have the PDF inside that.

You can use the <embed> tag, but now you're off the standards-
compliant track (probably works for everyone though)

If you use <object>, then the problem is that <object> doesn't embed a
PDF, it embeds a PDF viewer, i.e. a specific piece of software. Those
who prefer Foxit but have Acrobat installed too can find themselves
getting saddled with Acrobat, because that's what the page creator
specified as a first choice instead. This decision belongs with the
client really, not the page editor.