Frames With Style
By Michael Floyd
It was mid 1996 when Web Review's then managing editor Dave Sims excitedly demonstrated a prototype of the Webzine's redesigned interface for the Web Techniques staff. The demo highlighted a cool new feature that was all the rage in the Web design community: frames. A horizontal frame strewn across the top of the page contained a mocked-up banner ad. A second frame to support navigation ran along the bottom of the screen. Nestled between these two frames was a third frame running along the left-hand side of the screen. All of the frames thoughtfully provided both horizontal and vertical scrollbars, leaving very little real estate for the main viewing port in the right center of the screen. My initial reaction was, "Yuck! Looks like another example of frames abuse." Ultimately, Web Review ran a slightly modified version of this interface for several months before giving up on frames completely.
Web Review's experience exemplifies the experience of many Web sites. After all, frames presented both technical and design challenges. Despite new standardization, frame behavior in '96 was not uniform in the major browsers. Worse, it was -- and still is -- easy to mismanage frames. One common problem is that, in pointing visitors to another site via a hyperlink, designers often forget to include TARGET="_top", which forces the browser window to be redrawn. Thus, users are trapped in the first site's frames, even though they're no longer viewing that site. A similar problem occurs when a frame attempts to refresh itself, but forgets to refresh the rest of screen.
