Frames

Why frames?

This is a good question. I know that many poeple on this world hate homepages with frames. Me too. But on the other hand, this subpages are quite uesful. I can put the navbar in only one file and I have not to change 60(!) pages, if I only add one new subpage. But this is not all. Here a list with stuff that is good about frames:

• Easy-to-handle navbar
• Pages are showed during loading (no big tables over a whole page)
• ...

Then I tried to find out, why so many poeple (including me) hate frames. This is another list:

1. No chance for older browsers
2. Difficult to bookmark
3. There is a big bug in browsers if there are frames with the same name (see later)
4. Not optimal on small monitors

1. No chance for older browsers

This is true, but not on all the pages. In HTML, there is a tag named <noframes>, which allows to wirte some HTML-Code into brwosers that does not support frames. Most of pages of commectional companies display here only a small message which invites the visitor to get a newer browser.

My page also does so, but the user has a full-features linklist and full access to the sitemap. So she/he can visit my page with older browsers alo.

2. Difficult to bookmark

I solved this problem with my intopic-navbar. Do the following steps, if you want to bookmark a subpage:

1. Click on the button "New Window" () or "Fullscreen"(). You will have the page in a clean, no-framed-browserwindow..
2. Bookmark the page (Ctrl-D may help you).
3. If you wish to call the subpage, open your bookmark. To open the navbar agin, please use teh button "reactivate Frameset" ().
   This technique works, thanks to CGI on all browsers on the web. You do not have to activate JavaScript!

Chaos

You can reproduce this brwoser-bug:

1. Read the steps on this list and finally, click on teh link at the bottom.
2. The page on the bottom is the homepage of my school. The Mainframe is named mainframe, the problem: the big frame under the title (which contains the homepage of my school is also named mainframe
3. Click on a button in the navbar of my school.
4. Click on a second... (or better: try it)
5. Use the link in the title to come back here

How is that possible?

You create frames with the tag <frame>, which has an attribute name
With the help of this name, you can redirect links into a subwindow: The Tag to creatge links has an attribute named target which does this for you. Here some sourcecode from the page of my school:

 ...
 <a href="html/schulplan.htm" target="mainframe"><img src=".."></a>
 <a href="html/termine.htm" target="mainframe"><img src=".."></a>
 <a href="html/sov.htm" target="mainframe"><img src=".."></a>
 ...

 ...
 <frameset  rows="60,*">
     <frame name="45top33" src="cdemo.html"">
     <frame name="mainframe" src="/hopro/">
 </frameset>
 ...

The new browsers have a problem with that. If there is a link opened which tragets a frame which name exists more than one, the open the page in the first frame. The first "mainframe" is that of my page, so every link on my school will destroy the layout....

Help

There are some possibilities to fight against this problem: The best is to open all the external links into a new window (target="_new") or into the same window, but without frames (target="_top"). If you wish to give the user a backreference to your page, you can do that with the help of a small(!!) javascript-window, wich contains a button to lead the user back.

This way, you cannot create the problem. To avoid beeing in frames of other pages (which possibly have some frames that have the same name as yours), you can use one of the following tricks:

 <script language="JavaScript">
 <!--
 if (self != top) {
  top.location.href=window.location.href;
 }
 //-->
 </script>

But what to do, if a browser does not support JavaScript? Unfortunaly, it is not posible to turn the frames out automatically, but you can create a link, which does this on a simple click:

 <a href="#" target="_top">Click here!</a>

4. Small monitors

This is a problem that not only pages with frames have. On a resolution of 640x480, many of the pages are too small, because the navbar takes too much of place. It is difficult to solve this problem as easy as the ones above, but here, you will find a list, what to do if you have a small monitor, or if you wish to create a page that looks good on samll monitors:

• Use a big resolution instead of many colors. Use the table on the bottom to see, which resolution fits best to your monitor:

  Monitor	At least	Best	Maximum
  14''	640x480	640x480	800x600
  15''	640x480	800x600	1024x768
  17''	800x600	1152x882	1280x1024

  Maximum means, that this resolution my work, but may be too small and unsharp. But monitors that support these resolutions may exist... Try it out!

• If you have a monitor of 14'', you should possibly think of buying a newer model. On 640x480 it is under Windows even not possibly to display an A4-Page without horizontal scrolling!