Best practice - frames?

[Iain]

All,

I need to embed page at the top of my site that stays fixed, so when the
user scrolls up & down the page the button(s) remain at the top of the
page.

Frames seems the way to go, butI've read some negative comments
regarding using frames.

Comments/suggestions welcome!

TIA
Iain

 

[Göran Andersson]

All,

I need to embed page at the top of my site that stays fixed, so when the
user scrolls up & down the page the button(s) remain at the top of the
page.

Frames seems the way to go, butI've read some negative comments
regarding using frames.

Comments/suggestions welcome!

TIA
Iain

The drawback with using frames is that it's harder to link to the page.
Unless you add extra code in the frameset so that you can specify a page
in the query string, you can only link to the start page.

Search engines will tend to link to the content pages, where the
information is, rather than the frameset. People will land either on a
page without navigation, or on a page with only a few buttons that
doesn't work...

You can very easily accomplish something quite similar using css. For
example something like:

<div style="position:relative">
<div style="position:fixed;left:0;top:0;height:50px">
Buttons go here
</div>
<div style="margin-top:50px">
Content goes here
</div>
</div>

(The CSS would of course rather go in a style sheet than inline.)

 

[Scott M.]

The drawback with using frames is that it's harder to link to the page.
Unless you add extra code in the frameset so that you can specify a page
in the query string, you can only link to the start page.

Search engines will tend to link to the content pages, where the
information is, rather than the frameset. People will land either on a
page without navigation, or on a page with only a few buttons that doesn't
work...

You can very easily accomplish something quite similar using css. For
example something like:

<div style="position:relative">
<div style="position:fixed;left:0;top:0;height:50px">
Buttons go here
</div>
<div style="margin-top:50px">
Content goes here
</div>
</div>

(The CSS would of course rather go in a style sheet than inline.)

I think that you'll probably find more people advocating CSS over frames,
but even so, I do belive that frames can work in many situations, just fine.
And, that they may be a better choice when the audience could be using any
browser. Since browsers do vary in their compliance for CSS, frames could
work out to be better.

Solving the linking problem that Goran mentions can be done easily with a
simple JavaScript.

In my experience, the people that have bad things to say about frames have
always tended to be the ones that either didn't understand them properly or
saw someone using them improperly.

-Scott