Problems with using frames

• Are there any problems with using frames?
• What's wrong with using frames?
• Why are people saying not to use frames?
  • What are the alternatives?

Frames are notorious for the wide variety and severity of the problems they cause. The following articles detail some of these:

• http://www.htmlhelp.com/faq/html/all.html#frame-problems
• http://www.htmlhelp.com/design/frames/whatswrong.html
• http://www.htmlhelp.com/design/frames/usage/bad.html
• http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9612.html
• http://www.iso.port.ac.uk/~mike/whynoframes.html
• http://www.gooddocuments.com/techniques/areframesbad.htm
• http://html.tucows.com/webmaster/intranetstuff/areframesbad.html
• http://www.webcoord.unsw.edu.au/design/searchengines/searcheng2-Why-2.html
• http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/frames.html
• http://usableweb.com/topics/000515-0-0.html
• http://homepage.ntlworld.com/l_vajzovic/tom/web/frames.html

• You can use CSS to divide your pages in a similar way to frames. It can also do a lot more for you and its worth checking out. CSS FAQs

• Only one file is needed for your navigation links (or whatever) if you include one file in another.

• The CSS overflow property [[1]] can be used to add scrollbars to your DIV's which look very similar, and behave in the same manner, as frames. The overflow property will add a scrollbar to a box if its contents are too large to fit in it. Browser support for this technique varies in older versions. In Opera versions below v7 the content flows right out of the DIV, Netscape just cuts the text off, displaying no more than the DIV will allow. However the overflow property is fully supported by Opera7+ and Mozilla/Firefox.

.box {height: 200px; width: 200px; overflow: auto;}

The attributes are..

• visible - all the content will be displayed, even if it goes outside the declared boundaries of the box.

• hidden - the browser clips off whatever content goes "over the line." That is, it won't display part of the content.

• auto - the content will be clipped, but this time the browser will display a scrollbar if it's needed, so the user can get to the rest of the content.

• scroll - the content will be clipped, but this time the browser will always display a scrollbar, even if it's not required.

google.com

1. Reasons your site may not be included.

Your page uses frames. Google supports frames to the extent that it can. Frames tend to cause problems with search engines, bookmarks, emailing links and so on, because frames don't fit the conceptual model of the web (every page corresponds to a single URL). If a user's query matches the site as a whole, Google returns the frame set. If a user's query matches an individual page on the site, Google returns that page. That individual page is not displayed in a frame because there may be no frame set corresponding to that page. http://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html

Inktomi Web Search

our crawler does not index frames. This is due to the fact that frames are created as secondary part of a page, and website administrators do not like content linking directly to frames (which is what would happen if we were to return a frame as a search result). http://support.inktomi.com/Search_Engine/Product_Info/FAQ/searchfaq.html#frames

excite.com Possible reasons why you can't find your site

Your site uses frames and frames are not indexable. Frames allow a Web author to present several windows within one Web page, which is fine for design but not for indexing. Framed content is not indexable. http://www.excite.com/info/getting_listed/find_your_site/

• This one is, of course, perfectly wrong. Indexing framed content is as simple as parsing the frameset and grabbing the content of the SRC attribute in each FRAME element. Alternatively, simply grab the content of NOFRAMES. So frames are indexable; they just chose not to index them. Which is fine by me, btw :-).Matthias Gutfeldt