How to decide whether to use frames in web design

The most common use of frames is navigation. A set of frames usually includes a frame with a navigation bar and another frame to display the main content page.

However, the design of the framework can be complex, and in many cases you can create Web pages without frames, which can achieve many of the same effects that you can achieve with a set of frameworks. For example, if you want the navigation bar to appear on the left side of the page, you can either replace your page with a set of frames, or just include the navigation bar on every page in the site; The following illustration shows a page design with a similar frame layout, but no frames are used in the design.

Page design similar to frame layout

Many professional web designers don't like to use frames, and many people browsing the web don't like frames. In most cases, this aversion is due to encounters with sites that use frames poorly or unnecessarily (for example, a frameset that reloads the contents of the navigation frame whenever a visitor clicks the navigation button). If the framework is used well (for example, to keep navigation controls in a frame static while allowing the contents of other frameworks to change), these frameworks may be useful for some sites.

Not all browsers provide good framework support, and the framework may be difficult to display for visitors who cannot navigate. So, if you really want to use frames, you should always provide the Noframes section in your frameset to make it easier for visitors to see those frames. It is also a good idea to provide an explicit link to the non-frame version of the site for those visitors whose browsers support the framework but do not like to use frames.

Using a framework has the following advantages:

Visitors ' browsers do not need to reload navigation-related graphics for each page.

Each frame has its own scroll bar (if the content is too large to appear in the window), so visitors can scroll through the frames independently.

For example, when the content page in the frame is longer, if the navigation bar is in a different frame, the visitor who scrolls down to the bottom of the page does not need to scroll back to the top to use the navigation bar.

Using a framework has the following drawbacks:

It may be difficult to achieve precise graphic alignment of elements in different frames.

Testing the navigation can be time-consuming.

The URLs of each page with frames do not appear in the browser, so it may be difficult for visitors to bookmark specific pages (unless you provide server code that allows visitors to load a framed version of a particular page). )