Robert Dawson ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
: Well, yes, there are; there is no easy way to pass on a reference
: any more. It is aggravating when you want to send somebody the URL for
: one page in a big site and it is a frame on a huge page, so that the
: URL gets you only to the "home frame". Also, the same thing happens
: with bookmarking.
Further disadvantages of frames:
1) It's not possible for a browser to look at an individual content page
and determine what frameset it belongs to. This means that if a user
comes to a content page via a search engine that's indexed it, and all
the site navigation is kept in frames of its own, there will be no way
for the user to access the site navigation. This is commonly called the
"orphaned frame" problem. Promotional sites often try to solve this
problem by discouraging search engines from indexing anything but their
home page, but this isn't appropriate for informational sites, as it will
render the whole site opaque to most actual searches.
At the very least, individual content frames need to have links back to
the opening frameset.
2) Reduction of available screen real estate. The typical use of frames
sacrifices content area in order to keep navigational information
constantly in view, yet the user generally only needs to see navigation
information at the very beginning of a content page (if a quick glance
tells him he wants to go somewhere else) or at the end (when he's done
reading). For a commercial promotional site, there may be some value in
constantly keeping the company's name and logo within the user's visual
field in order to build brand identity, but this is just annoying with an
informational site.
3) Inaccessible content. If you make frames non-resizable,
non-scrollable and of fixed width, some text or image content may get cut
off if the viewer's font sizes are different from the designer's
(remember that on different platforms, the same point size may correspond
to different pixel sizes).
4) The usage of frames makes it difficult to print documents.
Most of the problems with frames occur on browsers that *do* support them.
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