Why Frames?

Like others, I am often frustrated and annoyed by the common abuse of Frames in web pages. In the past, I have been known to advise people not to use frames at all, because of the aggravation factor and the fact that they excluded a large fraction of web browsers. Aggravation from clicking a link to another site and discovering that it is now "trapped" into just one frame of the site it came from, and another user action (Open Frame in New Window) is required to rescue it. Annoyance at how much screen display space is wasted in a poorly-designed frame set (although the same could be said of many non-framed pages!). Frustration at how slowly pages load (although, again, the same could be said of many non-framed pages!).

Now that most people have had time to upgrade to browsers that support frames, it is reasonable to reassess the utility of frames. As a result of my reassessment of them, I have decided that their advantages now far outweigh the disadvantages if they are used with some constraint and a clear vision of why they are being used. Thus, I have settled on Frames as a way to simplify the maintenance and presentation of my own web site. With Frontier, I can eliminate the "trapped in a frame" effect. With Frontier, I can largely eliminate file duplication, thus speeding up display of common elements (common frame contents).

In my site, I have always maintained a complete hierarchical navigation system, with no pages omitted. The navigation controls have been automatically generated in Frontier when I render the pages. From a given page, links were provided to all parent pages, sibling pages, and sub-pages of a given page. Without frames, this had the unfortunate side-effect of requiring that all pages in a given section be re-rendered any time I added a new page to the section -- not because anything had changed on the existing pages, but simply to update the navigation links.

Now, by using frames, I have completely removed the navigation links from my individual pages. As a result, I don't have to re-render every page in a given section when I add a new page, just to add the new page link to the other related pages. Instead, I can render just the new page, the default page, and any index pages. The navigation frame (navbar) source is automatically rebuilt when I render the default page. This has the added benefit of making browsing a bit easier, since the navigation links are always at the same location on the screen, and don't disappear when the pages are scrolled.

By removing the large block of navigation links from each page, I have actually sped up the display of my pages. Only the initial load of a section (the default page) has to load the logos and navigation links, and the browser loads them and the starting content page in about the same time it used to take to load a single page with all the navigation links in the page.

Frames help me separate content from presentation. This is, of course, one of the major reasons for using Frontier to manage websites.

This means I can spend less time waiting for pages to render and more time improving and extending the content of the site. Which is good for me (my blood pressure, at least!) and good for anyone looking for the kind of content I'm providing.