mairving — Wed, 10 Oct 2001 13:19:16 +0000

Quote: Originally posted by Megan

Or was that a rhetorical question?

Are you trying to be rhetorical, Megan?

The Webmistress — Wed, 10 Oct 2001 13:13:43 +0000

Rhetorical but nice answer

Megan — Wed, 10 Oct 2001 13:10:47 +0000

Tables were never meant to be used for layout so that's probably one of the main reasons. I'm also guessing that they were probably invented before SSI, which meant that at the time they were the only way to keep one part of the page separate from another. All of our online courses here at work are set up in frames - probably because the courses are distributed on CD and can't take advantage of server-side functionality. (although some of the "design" people in the university just *really* like frames - you should see our website! I wasn't here when that decision was made so I'm not really sure)

Frames can be useful on some occasions but not often.

Or was that a rhetorical question?

The Webmistress — Wed, 10 Oct 2001 13:02:35 +0000

Why were frames invented??????????????

MarcD — Wed, 10 Oct 2001 12:59:01 +0000

Frames are the devil

tables are our savior

mairving — Thu, 04 Oct 2001 14:36:38 +0000

I personally think the opposite about frames. I think that frames are very dated and most of the time not necessary.

It appears that the use of frames falls into several different camps.

Those that don't know better. They use frames because that is the way that Frontpage decided to build their site.
Those that try to prevent looking at the source code.
Those that load fake web addresses.
Those that want a certain uniform look to their site when viewing in different browser settings.
Those that have a lot of pages to load and don't know how to use SSI or databases.

None of those are good reasons.

Megan — Thu, 04 Oct 2001 14:21:32 +0000

I'm going to have to disagree with that to some extent. Personally I think that frames are more trouble than they're worth. It's just a pain to get them to work right - much easier to use an SSI and be done with it. Of course, I'm still seeing a lot of really bad implementations of frames. There are some good ones, of course, and there are some cases where frames are the right choice, but overall I'd rather do without them both as a designer and as a user.

Suchey — Thu, 04 Oct 2001 13:57:05 +0000

Frames arent too bad...they have a really bad rap from back in the day when many browsers couldnt handle them...as a result, the "Old-Men" that are "teaching" web design still cling to the old principle that frames should be avoided. Its a trickle down effect. If you have items that you want to present for printing, an alternative solution may be to offer a printer friendly page. Something like a "Click here for printable version" with only the text or graphic on the resulting page.

Megan — Thu, 04 Oct 2001 13:30:17 +0000

Well, you might be able to do this without too much difficulty using SSI (server side includes - I will explain this below)). What you'd do is copy and paste your frame into a new layout using tables - I'm sure you'd be able to re-use some components. Then what you'd do is separate the template areas (header, which would likely contain a logo and navbar etc. and footer which might have a bottom text navbar and/or copyright statement etc.) into separate files.

Then you would need to get a piece of software that will do search/replace in whole diretories without having to open the files. Macromedia's Homsite will do this and you can get stand-alone programs as well. So then you'd just use that to insert the SSI code into every page (so you'd replace, say, the body tag with the body tag + the SSI tag underneath it)

A server side include is a piece of code that grabs a file from the server and literally includes it right into your .html page. Oh, that reminds me. You'll may also need to get a program to re-name file extensions - some servers support SSI files with just .html extensions but some need them to be called .shtm or .shtml. Hopefully someone will know what this software is called... I used to have it.

This is what an SSI tag looks like:

So it's just going to grab the header.html file and put it right into the page you're on. This makes it easy to keep common page elements like logos and navbars and footers separate from the actual content. This way if you want to make a change to your navbar, you just have to change one file instead of every page on the site.

I hope this makes some sense to you. How big is this site anyway?

The Webmistress — Thu, 04 Oct 2001 12:48:53 +0000

You would really be looking at then having to re-layout each of the other pages as you can't just plonk an extra bit into the code. You would have to use tables to layout the page and readjust the existing page layout to suit.