Rant! Rave! (Mostly about frames)

Wed Jan 29 10:24:55 EST 1997

The frames stuff is piling up too fast to respond to each post, so I'm
conflating several.

Quotes from many, flames toward none:
> Another example of a tutorial site using frames:
> http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/libexp/

A good example of a bad example, as one of my old professors used to
say.

Aside from my usual problem with frames (I run my browsers in
portrait-shaped windows, so any vertical navigation frame is likely to
make the document frame unusably narrow, GIFs won't fit, etc.), all the
links in the navigation frame seem to point at other framesets, rather
than putting specific documents in the other frame with a target=
attribute; doesn't that defeat much of the purpose?  But more to the
point, something like this...

    <NOFRAMES>
    <BODY BGCOLOR="#CC9933">
    <CENTER>
    <IMG SRC="images/p000b.gif" VSPACE=18><BR>
    At the present time Library Explorer on the World Wide Web requires
    Netscape Navigator 2.0 or greater to be viewed properly.
    </CENTER>
    </BODY>

...is factually incorrect, sloppily tagged, and more than a shade
arrogant, IMO.  The NOFRAMES tag is there so that you don't have to
show this kind of "Why don't you get a real browser?" mentality to the
world.  To me, this says "We couldn't be bothered to spend a few extra
minutes of our time on those of our patrons who cannot or choose not(*)
to use frames." 

(* I know of at least one very nice browser, Opera, that lets users
choose whether or not to enable frames.)

> Part of the trouble with frames is that people don't realize you can
use
> your right mouse button to go back within a frame (it certainly took
me
> long enough to figure it out :>).  Upon entering a framed site, the
back
> button will simply return you to where you were before entering the
> frames...

Aargh!  *Please* do not generalize from the inadequacies of your
browser to mine--mine has enough inadequacies as it is, but fortunately
not this one.  AFAIK, this back button mis-feature affected only one
version of one browser, and that version is now a major release behind.
 This is definitely information that Netscape 2.0 users need to have,
but you can't assume that it applies to other frames-capable browser
(and I would definitely counsel against writing browser-specific tips
into your HTML, as another poster suggested).

> Yes, too bad our screens are so small.

I actually have a 21 inch monitor at work with 1024x768 resolution, and
guess what?  I almost never run any application full screen.  In
numbers of pixels, my browser window may be a little taller than one
running full screen on an 800x600 15" monitor, but it's substantially
narrower--and I don't take kindly to sites that assume I'll resize my
window to suit their assumptions of how much screen real estate I
should give them.  So unless authors have some magic way of knowing my
window size, their frames are pretty likely to make the document
viewing area of my browser unusable narrow.

> How many of your users are still on Lynx?  Does it make sense to
spend 
> lots of attention on them if it means you are taking away from work 
> that will be seen by a larger audience...

Wasn't the original idea that you could write one platform-independent
document?  I try to keep my documents in line with current HTML
standards (that would be HTML 3.2 these days) and avoid techniques that
won't degrade gracefully on too many older browsers.  I don't spend any
particular attention on Lynx, aside from it being a browser I use
myself, but--mirabile dictu!--the HTML I write usually works just fine
on current versions.

Oh, for those of us who don't think standards should be dictated solely
by Mr. Marc and Mr. Bill, <FRAMESET> and <FRAME> are included in
neither HTML 3.2 nor the Cougar draft for the next version of HTML. 
(To be fair, the Cougar DTD says "The frame tags will probably be added
once we have an agreed definition for them.")

Also by they way, I've heard of one or two libraries whose home page
was framed within someone else's page without their knowledge or
consent.  I don't think that would go over well here, so I took the
preventative step of making all the links off our home page
'target="_top" '.  In theory, that should make any subsequent link from
a framed display of our home page grab the entire window.

Thomas Dowling
Asst. Director for Degrading Gracefully
Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu