On Friday, Sep 24, 2004, at 10:40 Australia/Sydney, Daniela Meleo wrote:
NOW, the client has decided that after handover he will need the ability to
easily add new pages whenever he needs to (as additional topics not yet
know become required.) He's an open source techie type and will hand code
the pages, so an authoring tool won't be used.
He wants me to change the site so that it uses frames.
Daniela:
Uh... raher than try and make the frames work, I strongly suggest you use max effort to convince/persuade/educate your client that frames simply aren't the way to go.
I used to use frames extensively in my site designs; I discovered the hard way that they're a PAIN to maintain - especially if you end up with nested framesets, as I did once or twice!
Since I started coding to Standards, my life is SO much easier. One file: one page. Maintenance is a breeze, and Search Engines love it.
All things considered, the only advantage I ever really found with frames is that some bits of the site can remain static while other bits scroll - fine for paranoid clients who ALWAYS want their logo visible, but otherwise...
Really, I understand the perceived (and maybe actual) saving in bandwidth by not duplicating (say) navigation code in single pages, but if you code with clean, lean (X)HTML, not only will your bandwidth overhead be reasonable (also taking advantage of caching) enough to serve your site as single pages, but your client, if he's got enough knowledge of code to do his own additions anyway, will find well structured code easy to edit. A few well-placed comments would help - although semantic markup of <div>s etc will as well.
Just my 2.5c, but hth
Nick ___________________________ Omnivision. Websight. http://www.omnivision.com.au/
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