IFRAMES....... discuss

iFrames can be dressed up very well but some people dislike them, some reasons for not liking them are: loose the use of mouse wheel, not displaying the same on all browsers, not backwards compatiable, can be made badly, is another file loading so takes longer ...

Hotmail uses iFrames, I always try miss that page but usually end up getting page errors if the main page hasnt loaded properly.
look at your needs, do you really need them? can you do the same thing without them? how big are the files ....

use iframes wisely if you must

I don't have a strong opinion on iframes except for when they're usd badly.

Some sites have scrollable iframes, in scrollable pages. This makes life difficult because I use a scroll mouse. When I scroll the end of the iframe page, the main page starts scrolling and misplaces my view. Then when I try to remedy it by scrolling up again, I end up only scrolling up the iframe page.
Yeah, it can be solved by scrolling with precision, but who wants to make that effort, anyway?

The other issue, I think, is compatibility. iframe was once only IE-safe. I don't know if that's changed now, but even if it has, I don't think NS would be as iframe-friendly as IE.

A great many people use iframes, or just frames, for that matter, not to keep their nav visible, but to save them having to keep copying their nav code for each HTML page. Yeah, that's reasonable, but if you have something like PHP, ASP, or just server-side includes available to you, then you could re-use the code on all pages safely.

I agree that iframes, like frames, have generally had a bad ride with people using them badly and compatibility is the major problem. I say there are better ways to display content to keep everyone happy!

I'm going to take a big step (formyself) on my next site, I am probably going to use PHP navigation. So no IFRAMES....big step.

Good luck on the big step
If you think the power of iframes are good wait till you get the php navigation going, you'll wonder how you ever got on before

I've got this PHP script that loads a page in the same spot a iframe would, it just has a php tag instead of an Iframe.

Well the site i'm the editor for uses Iframed index pages that work along side the old NewsPro 3.0 cgi scripts.

Ok, there have been SOME misdemenours from some people using older browsers but normally if the iframe is set up correctly there is no probs.

I also set up the iframe and newspro so it isnt scrollable and looks like a single page, which is the best thing to do with an iframe in my opinion...if you want to see what i mean the link is in my profile...its the index1.htm page though

What's the point of having an iframe if you're going to make it static? Might as well use an include and make things nice for all users.

Yeah, but then the include would make the entire index1.htm page end in .shtml now there aint much of a problem there, cause the index.htm page is a flash page, but the domian name isnt a redirecter, its a full scale domain with a nameserver which leads to the questions of search engine support for a .shtml page.

Also, the entire site is done in dreamweaver MX with a template, the last time i tried templating with .shtml standard it came out all ikky looking and half the time it didnt even update.

Thats why i went for the iframe method...easier, makes SURE the page gets indexed by the search engine robots and is easy to take out once another option comes around...

so you're a slave to a bad editor... :-/

I've heard there are add-on scripts for Dreamweaver for ssi, php, et cetera. You might want to look into that.

I remember in 1996 not being able to convince HoTMetaL Pro to do colours in the font tags, and it pressed me into learning how to do it myself in a text editor. Saved me a world of grief, that did. Also expense of editors that don't do what I want them to do.

Ahh, cool i'll look into the add-ons for dreamweaver, but it still doesnt help the search engine thing though...

I know that a few of the smaller engines can spider .shtml pages, but most of them just ignore them :-/

That doesn't make sense, actually. .shtml pages are solid pages. All my .php and .shtml pages have been crawled. Some of the bigger engines are crawling pdfs and databases.

Most of the bigger sites are put together with server-side programming -- .shtml, .php, .asp, .jsp and more.

Well i read that last year, so maybe its been updated to include stuff like that since then, i'll check up though...

That would be good. I know that the search engines try to keep up. If they follow a link, though, they call the server for that page and the page is put together and returned to the spider -- so it shouldn't matter at all if the page is hard-coded or dynamically put together.

S