Organizing Your Site with Frames

Frames are used to put multiple Web pages on screen at the same time. Because each framed page resides within its own distinct and limited area of the screen, the effect is to create a seamless whole out of many parts. All the frames together are contained within a different kind of Web page called a frameset. Framesets themselves are never seen by a site visitor. Only their contents which consist of the borders of the frames and the framed pages are visible. The primary reason to use frames is to provide at least one area of the screen where the content remains stable while another area changes. The stable area keeps something important in front of your site visitors at all times. What this important item is varies from site to site.

Most often, a special page showing a set of links to all the other pages in the site is kept in a small frame, while the pages themselves are displayed in the remaining screen area. The small frame with links is commonly called a navigation frame, because to navigate to any page in the site, visitors simply click one of the links in the frame, which loads the link in what could be called the ‘‘viewing’’ frame. By keeping the links content available at all times, visitors are able to move about the site more easily than if they had to constantly return to the home page to locate a links listing. Although navigational content is the most common use for frames, frames are sometimes used for other types of static content, such as a legal notice or graphic that you want to always keep in your visitors’ field of vision.

Designing Frame Layouts The first step in designing your framed screen is to determine how many frames you need in order to display your content. While that varies from one situation to another, a good rule of thumb is to use the minimum possible number of frames. Part of that statement is pure aesthetic opinion, and you may well disagree with it. Still, it is a simple matter of practicality that every Web designer must face there’s only a certain amount of real estate available on a computer screen. If you want to cram 20 or 30 frames into a frameset, it can technically be done but the results won’t be anything that anyone will be able to use easily.

So, how many frames is right? Again, it depends on the needs of the particular Web site you’re working on, but most Web designers would hesitate to have more than three to five frames on one screen. The smaller the content, the more frames you can get away with, but the key is to figure out what you really need to make the framed site work.

Analyzing functional needs

Do you have a corporate logo that you want to keep in front of visitors at all times? Frame it. Do you have a set of links that must always be accessible without users having to scroll up and down or retrace steps via the Web browser’s Back button? Frame them. Bearing in mind that the purpose of frames is to maintain some type of unchanging content for part of the screen layout, you must take a good look at which parts of your screen you want to lock into place, and which parts of it can be left free to scroll in the normal manner. If you don’t have anything that really needs to be locked into place, then you don’t really need to be using frames at all.

Creating navigation layouts

The vast majority of framed pages on the Web exist for navigational purposes. With this approach, one frame holds a set of links that, when acted upon, change the contents of the other frame or frames. The most common arrangement is a two-frame setup in which the navigation frame is relatively small, and the content frame takes up most of the screen.

However, many designers use either the top or bottom of the screen to hold the navigation frame. The right side is rarely used, but there is certainly no reason why it can’t be, especially if your Web site is meant for an audience whose native language reads from right to left.

Some sites even have more than one navigation frame, depending on the needs of the material involved. It is even possible to load one frameset into a frame in another frameset. In that case, the second frameset may have its own navigation frame that works only within that smaller area (see the discussion on the _parent target in the section, ‘‘Using reserved frame names,’’ later in this article).

Setting up action or result layouts

Frames are very useful when they are teamed up with JavaScript event handlers (see article 13). Although HTML links can cause only one kind of change (a new file address is called upon), JavaScript programming is much more powerful than HTML alone.