Avoiding Trouble by Understanding Frames Bad Reputation

It might seem strange to begin a chapter about frames by first mentioning why many people dislike them. Remember the title of this book? In order to use FrontPage faster and smarter than ever before, you have to know the pros and cons of using all of its features. Frames have many advantages, but one big downside is their bad rep. You don t want to look bad in the eyes of your customers or business colleagues by creating poorly designed frames-based Web pages. You should at least know why frames have a bad reputation, and how you can avoid the aspects of frames that irritate many Web surfers. Frames get criticized for many reasons. For one thing, they are frequently misused. What s the problem with frames, you ask? Here are some reasons:

Frames are easily misused Designers tend to put too many frames onto a single page. This confuses viewers , who lose track of where they clicked and what was supposed to change in response.
Frames aren t always supported Some older browsers don t support frames. While a small minority of viewers have such old browsers, they force the designer to come up with an alternate no frames layout for the page. Otherwise, non-frames browsers will display nothing at all.
Bookmarking can be difficult If a frames layout is not prepared correctly, visitors won t be able to bookmark a page that is contained within a frame ”and won t be able to easily revisit your site in the future.

There s another, subtler reason why designers and Web surfers alike tend to look down on Web sites that are designed with frames. Frames aren t considered as elegant or trendy as other interactive tools, such as layers or tables. A Web site that is obviously set up using frames is suspect because it seems clunky and untrendy. But it doesn t actually need to be that way, especially if you use FrontPage to do a professional job of it.

Note	There s an entire Web site called Frames Free! that s devoted to making frames obsolete. Before you prepare a frames layout yourself, it s a good idea to review what this site says about how not to use frames. Find out more at http://www.noframes.org .