Are all well-designed, professional sites now using CSS only, or do HTML frames still have a place? I am asking because I have been told that I should instruct the web designer for all my projects to use CSS only and not use Frames. Is this really the case? Thanks.
Jesus Christ frames have been dead 10 years ago... It's a useless technology. Frames disrupt the entire fundamental concept of the Internet: individual pages linked together with hypertext. Each page should have an individual URL, and could be used as a stand-alone entity, with navigation integrated into it. Frames mess up horribly with this fundamental concept... Frames are not accessible (though modern browsers don't have problems displaying them, it is very likely that website in a "frameset" won't display correctly in PDAs, cellphones, pagers, voice readers etc...). This means that frames are not a future proof techology as more and more people are starting to use these devices to access the Web every day. Printing pages in frames is very tricky and problematic, browsers tend to have problems with that. Now probably the biggest reason why not to use frames - SEO. Yeah that's right, search engines have problems reading content from frames so if you want your website to have greater chance to rank good in search engines such as Google or Yahoo, you better use CSS layout. There are probably more good reasons why frames suck.. but these are the most important ones. In conclusion, frames violate far too many accepted web standards to be a worthy information delivery system.
Frames were a bad idea in the first place - usually used by people too lazy to learn server side scripting or on free hosts that didn't allow that sort of thing. It went on the same junk heap as using javascript for mouse rollovers... at about the same time. Both were really bad ideas a decade ago, and for the past... six years there's really been no reason to do either. Though be careful - a LOT of people are advocating using AJAX to replicate the behavior of frames - with all the same stupid pitfalls and problems and quite often without even a fallback should the .js fail - making the pages made in it nothing but /FAIL/. Dan Schulz (you'll see him posting a good deal 'round these parts) once called AJAX "The new framesets" and he was right for what a LOT of people are throwing it at. Ajax has it's place, it's called web applications. Using it for normal site elements is as big of a /FAIL/ as framesets, the target attribute, flash for navigation, Drug addiction, alcoholism, sadism, beastiality, mutilation, murder, vampirism, necrophilia, cannibalism, not to mention a gamut of sexual goodies. Shall I go on?
You forgot "solicitation", "telemarketing" and "religious fundmentalism". Eagle-- to be clear, if you're going to tell frame-building web designers "No frame please" then tell them the alternatives: for the frame look, check out CSS frames (limited usefulness). For the single instance of something like a menu, header or footer which must show on every page, a change of which is reflected on every page, server-side scripting (like Php/whatever language of choice server-side includes, etc).
Thanks for the confirmation. If I was to put "no frames" in the contract, would I just need to specify "No HTML frames or tables" or is there a more appropriate term?
If they write HTML they know what both "frames" and "tables" mean... if they write other applications as well, make it clearer with "HTML frames or tables"... Actually, you should say "No HTML tables for layout, no framesets". Tables for real tables are necessary, and a good sitebuilder should know how to write tables correctly (using th, thead, tbody, tfoot if needed, knows what "headers="a1, a2, a3" would mean, scope...)
I see websites all the time that are still made with tables and I just don't understand why people do that. It must make it really difficult to to make changes to the website later if you want to re-order things on the page
Simple, most people learn presentational markup FIRST - and most people are learning from books written before 2002 or other people who learned coding before 2002. Now, why do I say 2002? Because separation of presentation from content, deployable support for CSS2, and a whole host of other things that make not using tables for layout viable was not deployable 'in the wild' just four to six years ago! Look at six years ago... Mozilla was an unstable pig only used by *nix geeks, Firefox wasn't even a twinkle in a FLOSS fanboy's eye yet, Opera was the only browser that costed money - Apple hadn't yet rescued the Konqueror codebase from obscurity and the most standards compliant browser on the market WAS... IE6. The educational system is on the whole slow to change - as is the publishing industry. These infrastructures just are not built to support industries where three year old knowledge is completely obsolete... ... and therin lies the problem. MOST developers who have been in the field for more than five years are still stuck in 1998 with tables and javascript - and if the people already doing it are stuck there how is anyone supposed to learn to do it different? Think on this - how are you supposed to teach a four year program where anything taught in year one is obsolete at graduation? Net result, you have maybe 10% of the web development community who take the time to keep their skill sets updated, and 90% who shouldn't even be in the industry in the first place. As I'm fond of saying, the day you think there's nothing new to learn is the day the world leaves you behind. You also have to look at the mindset and habits learning presenational markup first brings to the table - automatically whenever someone wants a new visual effect, they dive for the markup, not the CSS... That's why you see page after page of div's around UL's that don't even DO anything. Worse, you get the people who go from presentational markup to CSS, and start doing things like <div class="center noBorder clearfix bold"> /FAIL/ /FAIL/ /FAIL/ - completely misses the POINT of using CSS in the first damned place. "Modern" coding requires a fundemental shift in design philosophy, and a lot of people who've been at it for a while are failing to jump that hurdle. - Thankfully I've been at it so long I'm used to discarding methods for new ones every year. Another of my sayings "If you look at your own code from a year ago and are NOT disgusted, hang up your shingle now."
Much thanks everyone and great quotes deathshadow I've put those requirements in the contract. Here's to good web design.
The actual frame concept is useful sometimes, not for your average website however. Honestly, if you have to actually put this in the contract they are useless and you would be better off spending your money paying a real professional... I can't believe you'd actually have to put such basic things in the contract (while you are there add in "no fluro coloured text on white backgrounds", they're probably a fan of that too) If you've got a doctor, you expect him to know his stuff because he's a professional. If you have to tell your doctor what not to do because hes going to do something retarded, then there is something screwed up. Same goes with your website developer - if you have to tell them what to do, they aren't a professional at all...
Problem is, how do I know if they are using good code without going through their old sites and reading the code myself and unfortunately, my knowledge of HTML is not good enough to do that. The contract is more like a filter. This is what you must do, will you do this? If not, then they are out before I hand them any money. Finding someone you can trust with your project is an overwhelming job, so it is good to have a safety net.
LOL I still got a large website built on frames in top 3 positions for all major keywords in Google. It is too big to even think about rewriting it because I am too busy with other projects. While its positions are only improving, I have no real reason for re-doing it. I know I will have to some time in the future but at the moment I am not too bothered about it But, yes, generally speaking, frames is such a bad idea and unless you got some really, I mean, really big backlinks, you are totally dead and lost if your site uses frames!