Introduction
“Good Practice” is quite frankly a matter of personal opinion. Perhaps tempered by what we read and see, a willingness to take continuing educational courses in web design, or simply a matter of selecting what we think is a "good practice" web site design and following suit.
Practical Considerations
You have heard statements or read the same like: I do not care about SEO, my website has plenty of international attention and people apply for my award; my website is beautiful and yours is ugly and I use frames; I do not really care about the validation fuss or accessibility because I have plenty of visitors or I am quite content with my web site and it receives awards all of the time.
Saying anything about SEO or CSS will not budge the thankfully very small group of web authors above into making a change in anything. So in reality this article on why not to use frames is intended for those who do not have anything to unlearn or really see a need to change and will in time, change.
I was laughing so hard and loud at a movie scene, the family came piling into the den to hear what was so funny. Trying to explain, while still laughing, that a girl heard something going bumpy bump then searching the apartment for the source of the noise. Suddenly a room mate dashed into the kitchen, past the searcher to the microwave when suddenly out flew a pair of tennis shoes into outstretched arms. A family member commented that someone will think drying tennis shoes in the microwave is a good idea and will try drying more than tennis shoes.
Following a Leader or By Example
Then I thought there are some web page building techniques which if found, may lend encouragement to try, just like drying something other than tennis shoes in a microwave. Like blinking marques, different fonts and colors for a narrative, large images which have not been optimized and even on broadband take a long time to load or having music which is not easy to turn off. But thankfully a serious hobbyist who is involved in the joy of award giving, will avoid at all cost. But some of the above persist even with the flood of valid reasons for avoidance found in virtually every rated award programs criteria and SEO articles by all of the major search engines.
Frames
Frames sites were huge in the late ‘90’s. Now here we are almost two generations later and we will still encounter frames-based websites, even if they’ve lost popularity with the web design community as a whole. CSS is still relatively a new idea to some, and others don’t want anything to do with it. It’s these webmasters who may find the learning curve of CSS too steep to tackle, or simply like the way frames make it easier for them to maintain their websites. Whatever the reason to use frames, they are slowly disappearing into obscurity.
The idea of HTML frames was originally thought up to solve navigation problems for larger websites with hundreds of pages and a lot of content. They didn't help – in fact, they created more problems than they solved – but the worst of it was that frames got adopted by all sorts of amateur website designers who were building sites with none of the navigational complexities which frames were created for in the first place.
This is all old news, of course. It's now generally accepted that frames are a bad idea. In fact, it was decided that frames were a bad idea almost two decades ago. The instance of framed websites nowadays is, I am pleased to say, very small, and most people agree that they were a horrible idea. I could have explained some of the main problems with framed websites, because there are valuable lessons to be learned about why they were rejected by designers. Although framed websites are no longer popular, other trends in web design cause many of the same problems. All-Flash websites are some of the worst offenders: as with framed websites, browser commands are rendered worthless, internal book marking is impossible, they don't comply with web standards, style and content are hopelessly entangled.1
No to Frames-Respected Authors
Jakob Nielsen Quote: Judging from the email I receive, the most controversial statement I have made in my Alertbox columns so far was to make "the use of frames" one of the mistakes in my first list of top ten mistakes in Web design.2
Frames break the unified model of the Web and introduce a new way of looking at data that has not been well integrated into the other aspects of the Web. With frames, the user's view of information on the screen is now determined by a sequence of navigation actions rather than a single navigation action.
For new or inexperienced Web designers, I stand by my original recommendation. Frames: Just Say No.
No to Frames-Search Engine Web Authoring Techniques
Google supports frames to the extent that it can. Frames can cause problems for search engines because they don't correspond to the conceptual model of the web. In this model, one page displays only one URL. Pages that use frames display several URLs (one for each frame) within a single page. If Google determines that a user's query matches the page as a whole, it will return the entire frame set. However, if the user's query matches an individual frame within the larger frame set, Google returns only the relevant frame. In this case, the entire frame set of the page will not appear.3
Because of the way frames pages are designed, Yahoo engine spiders have a very difficult time crawling these sites. Frames use client-side code, or code that is executed by the browser on a visitor’s computer, instead of executed at the server. While some search engines do okay with client-side code, for the most part, search engine spiders have a difficult time with it. Most search engine spiders completely disregard client-side coding. So if this code is required to view the proper format and layout of a page, then you can see why spiders may get “confused” with understanding a page that relies solely upon client-side code.4
No to Frames Groups
There is nothing remotely "pretty" or eye appealing about web site authors who use frames. However a large group loath frames layouts to the extent that they form clubs, community groups and campaigns to outlaw actually this ancient and arcane practice.
The Frames Free! ribbon is a mark of quality. Sites containing it are taking their visitors' need into account by excluding frames.
This group provides resources or alternatives for stamping out frames used in HTML writing. An authorial and well wrote depository of solutions and techniques to break the chain which results in code bloat and complexity of updating a web site.
Footnotes:
1International I Hate Frames Club (IHFC).
2Why Frames Suck (Most of the time), by Jakob Nielsen.
Copyright:1986-2008