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

[Peter-Paul Koch]

> > ...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). There 
>we go again <g>. They're fully capable of deprecating frames, of course... 
>(not that I will pay the slightest attention).

>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.

Exactly. The point is, W3C is supposed to do stuff like this, kind of set 
out the lines for future development, and in theory they're right, CSS 
positioning can replace frames in, say, the Version 7 browsers. So, yes, 
their recommendation should include something about not using frames any 
more.

The problem with this kind of ideas is that people seem to think that it's 
the True Gospel as soon as the recommendation has been released and will 
immediately start to send boring mails that Thou Shalt Not Use Frames, even 
though it doesn't (yet) make sense to rigidly follow the recommendation.

We've seen this before with the deprecation of <IMG NAME> (and, to a lesser 
degree, with XHTML) and now we'll see it again with the deprecation of 
frames.

So the bottom line is: please remember that W3C is right when talking about 
the *future* but that doesn't mean its recommendations should be followed to 
the letter in the *present*.

Just my 2c, hoping to prevent yet more endless flame wars about this 
subject.

<TIP TYPE="NN4 and borders" AUTHOR="ppk">
When using border declarations in style sheets meant for NN4, please 
remember that old NN4's (say, below 4.7) may crash on too many elements with 
borders. So be careful and test your page in NN 4.5 or 4.6
</TIP>

ppk

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