Frames - love them or leave them?

What are frames? Frames are controversial Traps to avoid if you use frames Some second opinions

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What are frames?

Frames are a technique which packages several pages inside another page.

For example the screen you're looking at contains the following pages:

Frames are controversial

Possibly the most controversial technique in web page design!

Against frames:

• Users have to use a special technique to find a text string in a framed page .
• The URL displayed in the browser's Address / Location bar is that of the frameset (container page), so it's generally impossible for users to copy the URL of a particular content page and email it to friends.
  But there are ways round this difficulty, which this site uses.
• The user must click in the content area before he / she can use the keyboard to move around the content.
  But there are ways round this difficulty, which this site uses.

For frames:

• Frames allow different parts of the browser window to scroll independently of each other. So users can search one part of the screen without losing their place in another part.
  There are other ways of achieving this but frames are the most problem-free technique for independent scrolling.
• Menus which expand / collapse when the user clicks on sections of them are very useful for large sites or even for large documents within a site. Frames are probably the best way to package such menus because the menu won't force content elements to move as the menu opens / closes.
  Look at Webmonkey and see what happens to the content below the menu on the right when you click on the name of a folder.
  
• Frames make it easy to impose a standard layout on a site.
• Frames which stay on view (like our menu) don't have to be downloaded again - this reduces the next page's load time.

Obsolete and debatable objections:

• Many people have claimed that it's very difficult to bookmark specific pages in a frameset.
  But Internet Explorer 5+ bookmarks individual framed pages as easily as non-framed pages - IE5+ dominates the browser market and is gaining market share (see W3schools' statistics).
• Some people claim that frames are confusing to users.
  But users are familiar with split-screen layouts in Windows Explorer, most email programs and many computer games.
• It's often claimed that users have to use a special technique to print the contents of a framed page - if they just click the Print button, they're unlikely to get what they expect.
  But IE 5+ will print a whole frameset (the whole set of framed pages) without any fuss.

Traps to avoid if you use frames

Don't include other sites' pages in your frames:

• It may ruin the proportions of the other site's page - this makes your site look bad because the page is displayed in your frameset with your site name, logo, etc.
• It looks like you're stealing the credit for someone else's work.

Don't accidentally show your frameset within itself or another of your framesets.
Click the link in our example's bottom right frame a few times to see how stupid it looks.

Don't force the content into a narrow slit - our example shows how unpleasant this is.
Avoid placing additional frames above and / or below the content.

Some second opinions

We use frames, so you might like to know what others have written about frames.

Check the dates on articles about frames - a lot of them were written before version 4 browsers, which handle frames much better than their predecessors.

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