To Frame or not to Frame?

FreeBaGeL said:

However, I've heard many bad things about frames. Would I be better off just creating a function to call the header and navigation pane and including them on each page?

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Stay away from frames - there are a wide variety of reasons why it is rare that modern site design generally precludes the use of frames. Indeed, use a language such as ASP or PHP and include your external navigation elements.

I haven't done a framed site for clients in the past 5-6 years. Just my $0.02...

Rob

I've got to agree with RTM. These days, I can't think of many reasons to still use frames. The bad points heavily outweigh the good. I've seen some articles and methods that appear to have found ways to make frames more friendly (for search engines, etc.) but they seem to create more work and maintenance for the webmaster, which defeats the whole purpose. IMHO, you should avoid them.

EDIT: I am not an expert on frames. I am just speaking from my own experience and research.

The real value to frames is to steal content
and features from other web sites.

not to frame, plain and simple

dna said:

The real value to frames is to steal content
and features from other web sites.

Click to expand...

Hmmm.... perhaps, in some ways. On the other hand, that can also be done using funky include statements and/or URL rewriting...

I would say that frames were originally used primarily to provide static navigational elements such as menu bars. As coding technology advanced (Javascript, DHTML, PHP, ASP, etc.) there were far more elegant ways of achieving the same objectives without using framed pages...

Rob

it depends entirely on the application to be honest. frames can be a very handle and powerfull tool depending on what your doing with them.

im currently buidling a support/sales/faq customer support portal for my business and its using frames. simple reason is there are pages in the frames such as navigation (which is tree style) and once loadedwill never need to load again. ive also got static links on some of the other pages which have links to load link frames, contact us etc etc why should i load these all the times? i dont care about se postions because google doesnt need to spider it. its for users with logon details only. and becuase i dont need to load js files for navigation or links etc it saves on bandwidth which saves on money.

it really depends on the application your building if your using them for a public for people to use dont use them. it doesnt do your site and seo any good. but if your using them for people to use. where seo and link backs etc dont matter then its fine.

From my experience... do not use frames!!! Only after establishiong yourself (website) feel free to use them

DON'T use frames USE php include

I would not use frames on any website. I like the fact they give you some extra navigation options, but I stay away from them. The only time I have ever used frames was in an admin control panel which I new only a few people were going to be using, I had almost a hundered links I needed to display, and I could control which browser etc. the user was using. I would never recommend frames for a production website that has a large target audicene, or variables that you cannot perdict, like browser types. They also make it extremely hard for handicap users, and aural browsers (browsers that read the content out loud for blind people)