Thanks for the link Baba. As my topics range ever deeper into the bizarre, I hope you don't end up regretting it.

As a sign of my gratitude, I will briefly demonstrate a very hypothetical case of site designed with frames (I won't pick a specific site,) and a site designed without frames. For the sake of comparision, let's assume they are both sites that are frequently updated. The site with frames will be full of news and information relevant to a large group of people, the site without frames will be the ravings of an idiot.

Let's imagine a third site. This site wants to point out something witty and useful on the site with frames, and compare it something moronic and banal on the site without frames.

On this hypothetical lunatic site without frames, the mad author has even seen fit to include anchors to his section headings, and made those anchors obvious to the reader with little "link" tags (through no cleverness of his own, mind you, he's much too stupid, he just uses a good tool.) So the third party site can link directly to the relevant information.

Alas, our third party site is now presented with a problem. If he or she links to anything other than the main URL of the site with frames, all navigation links within that site will be lost. The visiting user will be presented with a dead-end (like this.) And, to compound matters, each entry within this news site has no anchors by which to mark specific text. So, the third-party site doesn't bother to link. The raving luntic is cited instead. And when lunatics are cited over clever, intelligent people who actually have something to say, I don't think you can say that "frames work."

Now, doing the stuff with the anchors and the "link" tags is more work, I'll admit. Though frames can generally be eliminated very easily by using tables instead. What I suggest to any hypothetical news-type site is to examine the Blogger tool closely. It will even do archives for you automatically, so the link tags never break. Getting the knack of including the pictures will involve two steps, but in the end, you have a better site, I think.

Just a thought.

(And if you are going to insist on using frames, add some redundant navigation links to the bottom of each page at least.)
posted 5:05 PM | link |