[thelist] Frame Bashing (was: frameborder=0)

[Aylard JA (James)]

Mark,

> ...Is it true that W3C are considering
> depreciating frames? Why don't you like them?? Discuss!!

	Yes, it is true that the XHTML 1.1 Working Draft does not support
frames at all (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/changes.html#a_changes). In
theory, the use of CSS 2 will allow the construction of sectioned pages
without the use of frames, but widespread support is not there yet (for
instance, Mozilla 0.8 supports "position: fixed", although Netscape 6.x does
not). Needless to say, it will be quite some time before the use of CSS 2
will replace the use of frames in practice.
	I do think that carefully constructed framesets do have a place, but
they also have drawbacks (e.g., book-marking problems) that the developer
should understand and accept before using them. There are some workarounds
that help to mitigate some of these drawbacks (e.g., appending querystrings
onto URLs that tell the browser which documents to load into which frames),
but they are not perfect, either.

James Aylard