Framesets

  1. The main frameset page uses it's own Doctype:
    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Frameset//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-frameset.dtd">
  2. frameset (rows, cols, bordercolor, frameborder, framespacing, title) (Work from top down, left to right), wildcards *
  3. frame (name title src bordercolor frameborder id longdesc marginheight marginwidth
    noresize scrolling)
  4. noframes
  5. use of targets

Inline Frames

  1. iframe (src align frameborder height id longdesc marginheight marginwidth name
    scrolling title width)

Issues with Framesets

  1. Not Universally Supported? (More like almost universally disliked)
  2. W3C May Deprecate Frames
  3. Printing Issues
  4. Tim Berners Lee feels they violate the very concept of an URL
  5. Search Engine Issues (especially SEO, and individual HTML file access)
  6. Bookmark Issues
  7. Accesibility and Frames (ADA issues)

Advantages?

  1. Navigation (careful of frame trapping)
  2. Easier Menu Maintenance, but have to be more careful in page design
  3. Degrades Gracefully with use of <noframes>??? Not really
  4. Unifies Resources? (Do users even notice/care about URLs?)
W3C Button to test XHTML validation