Curious as to how many #webdev #webdesign #UX folks worked on HTML frame-based (<frameset> makes me giggle now) sites back in the day. Or even now! šŸ¤£ The Web Mistakes Confessional is now open ā³

Feb 15, 2021 Ā· 8:56 PM UTC

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Replying to @mholzschlag
I'm working on one now
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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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Replying to @mholzschlag
I absolutely did. Then, I discovered the wonders of DHTML, so I could fake frames without the frameset element. I loaded the whole content of the site into separate divs on 1 page, and swapped them out with JS. Super fast performance once it all loaded.
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Ha! Was this during <div> v. <layer> and DOM incompatibility in IE and NN ca. 1998 I wonder? :)
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Replying to @mholzschlag
I remember building a set of help files that were entirely based on frame sets. Even spotted a similar approach on an audit I did last year.
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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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Replying to @mholzschlag
Of course, thankfully things are a bit nicer these days. But they did make it nice and easy to do didnā€™t they
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Did they? I can barely use the Web and insofar as esthetics it's not exactly CSS Zen Garden optimism. Sometimes I think presentation for document-based Web sites is pure waste. Of course, esthetic to me is often in the content, not the site's "design".
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Replying to @mholzschlag
One of my first personal website designs used frames. I got about two or three months into the build and just said, "nope!" Then it was tables. Inside tables. Inside tables. With spacer gifs. And a little DHTML magic for rollover images.
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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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