Web Software: When It's OK to Use Frames

When It's OK to Use Frames

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox for December 1996

The main issue in using frames is to ensure that URLs keep working. To do so, all hypertext links must have a TARGET="_top" attribute in their anchor tag (e.g., <A HREF=foo.html TARGET="_top"> ). Adding the _top makes the browser clear out all the frames and replace the entire window with a new frameset. The destination frameset may well have many frames that are identical to the ones in the departure frameset and will be cached in the browser, but by forcing a complete reload in principle, the browser gets a new URL for the destination. This means that navigation actions (e.g., bookmarking) work again and that the URL is available for other people to link to.

The only exception from the need to use a TARGET="_top" attribute is when frames are used as a shortcut for scrolling within a single page. For example, a very long directory or other alphabetical listing could have a frame on top listing the letters of the alphabet. Clicking one of these letters would cause the listing to scroll within another frame while keeping the user on the same page and thus not destroying navigation.

Frames are also useful for "meta-pages" that comment on other pages. For example, a Web design styleguide may need to mix discussions of design principles with live examples of entire pages that follow (or break) the rules. In these cases, the embedded page should be treated as an embedded image (even though it is implemented as an independent page) and the "main" information that users will want to bookmark should be the content of the commenting frame.

Finally, it seems that the inline frames introduced in HTML 4.0 will be mostly harmless. A frame that is inlined will be subordinate to the main page, and the user can still bookmark the main page and navigate as usual. Since mainstream browsers still do not implement HTML 4.0, we don't know whether inline frames will have their own implementation problems: in particular, it is doubtful whether good ways will be found to print pages that have scrolling inline frames (my current best guess is that it will be best to print the currently visible part of a scrolling inline frame in order to maintain the layout of the main page, but some users may want to have the entire contents printed, so messy option settings may be necessary).

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