[thelist] Frames question

Mon Oct 27 20:16:15 CST 2003

I work in a large company with many people of differing skills. Some of 
these people have almost no knowledge of html at all but their 
responsibilities include doing a lot of web-based stuff. One person in 
particular is responsible for html email which she does using 
Dreamweaver. Although she knows nothing about HTML she is not too bad 
at making a nice layout.

Her latest responsibility is to convert a 250 page Word document for 
internal employees to view on an intranet. Since the document is so 
long, and since merely saving the Word document as HTML is not 
acceptable to her, she wants to re-do this document as web pages using 
frames. A left frame for the Table of Contents, a top frame for 
indicating the current chapter, and a main frame for the individual 
pages.

She has asked me to help her, but I find it somewhat frustrating to try 
to explain things to her because when it comes to technology she tends 
to freak out rather than try to understand. So I'm trying to help her 
do it as simply as possible.

My question is, what is the simplest way to set this up? If each 
chapter needs to have a different heading page loaded into the top 
frame, and this chapter heading page needs to sync up with any page in 
that section, what is the simplest way to do this? If I resort to 
javascript, how do I do that with Dreamweaver? Can I write some code to 
stick in the <head> part of the page? How do I get it in there using 
the  Dreamweaver interface? Can it be a library item or something like 
that? I don't really know how to use Dreamweaver since I haven't used 
it since version 3 and now I code everything by hand and use server 
technologies whenever possible.

Server technologies are not an option for this project. I would prefer 
to stay away from javascript, too, if I can. Forget about standards 
compliance, the evils of frames or any other such debate. I need a low 
tech, circa 1997, solution. Believe me it was a major win to get her to 
use a simple stylesheet, and even with that, I'm sure she's still going 
to put font tags everywhere anyway.

Thanks for any help.

Diane