It is the true teacher who leaves the class knowing they have learned the most.
Tucson, AZ
Joined September 2006
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For a while, mine too (I wrote a book in the Laura Lemay series that was so awful but yet, it worked lol!)
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Indeed. And if you recall, sandbox play during frame heavy years brought about some very compelling visual results. I remember as soon as we could hide frame chrome, all kinds of wild experiments took off :)
How did you manage that with incompatible DOM issues? Was it easier because of JS to manage that? Sounds like an entire file system resulted! :)
I already had to do app like functionality in the enterprise space, so writing out framesets in popup windows based on calculated information was common. Some of the JS had so many "parent." it felt like navigating a huge harddrive on console using "cd .."
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From DMXZone (I wrote for them too!) Theirry offers up a 20 year or so of his early articles on frames. Worth a read - especially if you never were exposed to them or this era of #HTML - Thanks Thierry!
One of the first article I wrote about web dev was a 10 pages tutorial about frames and framesets.
After ~20 years I can still find some reference to it :)
dmxzone.com/go/732/frames-so…
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SSIs pre-dated frames but worked with them quite interestingly. SSIs were part of so many server methodologies from native to ColdFusion! And while problematic, all predated problems and solutions (restful tech for one) in our Web evolution. :)
Do you remember the goal and reason frames were chosen? Or was it "cool" factor or a form of sandbox play?
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Leslie, tables within tables is what we had for layout. iframes hold an intriguing piece of Web history. This was our timeline of learning and evolving, after all!
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Very interesting choice. May I ask what factors brought you to the idea, or is it legacy? While other techniques supercede them now, they are not gone and do have certain features of influence and use.
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Legacy issues are disconcerting as there seems no historic data as to the benefits and risks. What do you do when faced with an existing site like that now?
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With some finesse, that model had some merit. Frames brought interesting times and still exist despite having better approaches now overall. We did this with tables too for sidbar navigation :)
Gareth, this was a very natural progression in #UI via HTML during that time. They all evolved better practices in the end but IMO for DHTML, which in hindsight is one of the foreshadwings of abstract vs. semantic markup and open, accessible web practices. But oh, we learned! :)
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That makes sense, and I'm sure was no easy task with the DOM problems of the era. There are working frame based sites in use today. I worry that newer devs haven't usually been exposed to the techniques and issues lest they are challenged to update such sites. :)
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Yes! And inline frames drove advertising and other aspects that grew new ideas about layout and 'restful' (if you will) approaches prior to 2000!
They were legit to use at the time, and making mistakes is how we learn after all, if we continue to advance our skills to more contemporary, accessible approaches as they were implemented.
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They had their uses indeed. And are still in use from what folks are saying despite #CSS and related replacing them. What was your response when found on audit? Frames could be carefully designed to be relatively accessible and contain unframed content too :)
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