Help Desk
By Joshua D. Drake, guest Webmaster
Mind Your Manners
Once upon a time it was considered bad Web manners to code highly nested tables instead of framesets. Is this still the case?
—Buck
It depends. The nice thing about using nested tables as opposed to frames is that all current browsers support them. Internet Explorer 4.x and later, Opera, Konqueror, and Netscape support nested tables very well. However, there are some minor exceptions. Netscape 4.x for Linux supports nested tables, but it doesn't draw the tables efficiently.
This problem will be resolved when KDE2 releases the stable versions of Konqueror (www.konqueror.org) and when Netscape 6 is finally released.
On the other hand, every browser still draws frames slightly differently. If you peruse the site www.carrauto.com in Internet Explorer and Netscape, you'll see what I mean. Internet Explorer draws the frameset well, but Netscape has a slight misalignment as you adjust the window size.
Netscape 4.x also doesn't support the IFRAME tag, which stands for Inline Frame. This error isn't as prevalent in the latest constructions of Netscape 6, but it's still there. Konqueror handles this page wonderfully.
The IFRAME tag is an excellent tool and it's a shame that Netscape 4.x doesn't support it. The ability to draw a frame window within a table cell can be very useful. Although far from the norm, many people are starting to use simpler browsers. The browser w3m for example (
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