To Frame or Not To Frame?

They have: 15 posts

Joined: Mar 2000

Ok guys, I'd like to hear your most talented and experienced thoughts about using frames with intricate layouts... I'm tired in trying get well aligned layouts with normal frames html tags, but in all cases it looks well in MSIE but not in Netscape browsers, even stating the frame width or height in pixels and not in percentage.

What's your advice?

Vincent Puglia's picture

They have: 634 posts

Joined: Dec 1999

Hi mexboy,

It depends what you use the frames for.
If they are used mainly for navigational reasons, dHTML menus offer a cleaner solution -- the downside is loss of version 3 users. If you use frames for maintaining state (passing parameters, etc.), there are other methods (cookies, opener, location.search, etc.)
Even if you switch to a table layout with dHTML, there will still be alignment problems, not to mention additional coding headaches to create crossBrowser dHTML.
About the only real plus with a non-frame layout is that you know what the page will look like if someone links to it.

Vinny

Where the world once stood
the blades of grass cut me still

mjames's picture

They have: 2,064 posts

Joined: Dec 1999

Don't use frames! They are so ancient with all the new design techniques nowadays. The reason why your site looks good in IE, but bad is NS, is because NS is a lot more picky than IE. I recommend you stop by http://www.sitepoint.com for some helpful webmaster-related articles. Smiling

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