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Practical Web Design - Frames and Frame Usage Explained

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Final Tips

Always include alternative navigational links for your framed HTML pages for those who don't have frames-capable browsers.

Always, always, always add the target="_blank" attribute to links to outside Web pages from within your framed pages. Otherwise, your frame may envelop the outside site within its frameset. That effect (sometimes deliberately inflicted upon poor innocent surfers by evil-minded Web designers, most often employed by commercial sites that want to keep their ad-heavy frameset in front of your face at all times) angers both Web surfers and site owners who don't want your frameset "hijacking" their content. There may even be legal repercussions to trapping other sites in your frames.

Keep other folks' frames from engulfing your pages by including this <meta> tag in the <head> section of every page:

<meta http-equiv="Window-target" content="top" />

Bookmarking a framed HTML page is easy enough -- just right-click inside the frame, choose "Add to Favorites" or "Add Bookmark," and that framed page is bookmarked. Of course, most modern versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer can bookmark framed pages without the fuss of right-clicking.

You can share data between several frames using the <object> tag. This is a little more sophisticated than the rest of the material I've covered, so I'll leave it to you to find out more about how to use this command. Start with the W3C specifications.

A suggestion relating to the <object> tag above: using JavaScript or CGI scripts to help manage your framed sites dramatically increases your ability to keep everything together in a reasonable amount of time, and gives your visitors more control over their navigation and usage of your site. As I'm neither a JavaScript nor Perl codemaster, I'll let you learn about that on your own! You can start this investigation, too, with the W3C specifications above, and continue with SitePoint's own excellent Designing with Frames tutorial from the inimitable Kevin Yank.

Want to learn how to make an index page that works for both IE and Netscape, as well as for browsers that don't support the effect? About.com has a nice little tutorial on how to use a JavaScript snippet to achieve this goal.

Have fun framing, and as always, feel free to comment in the Forums. Who knows, you may actually find a use for frames in your site that you hadn't considered before!