In this issue

This months topic is as old as the Web.  Frames are a way of splitting the screen into rectangles, with each rectangle scrollable separately.  No sooner had Nescape invented it and put it in their browser (Version 2 I think) than two things happened:

1. There was a rush to adopt it by a bunch of early adopters
2. Others spotted almost immediately that they were a bad thing

Jacob Nielsen, the renown usibility expert (find him at http://www.useit.com - don be put off by the spartan nature of his site, his work is research-based) wrote a column called Why Frames Suck in 1996.  A lot of the issues he identified at that time don apply any more - for example at the time there were users around whose browsers didn support frames. 

However his primary analysis was and is spot on.  The web is based around the concept of a page and frames are plain just not a page, they are a sort of composite of several pages.  This means that a lot of the page-based concepts that all users are familiar with - like go back one page, or print this page, have an ambiguous meaning.  Lets make an example.  Look at this page.  Now a word of warning, I am using IE6 and different browsers do different things, so you might have to take my word for it on the following experiment.

Click on the link in the left hand frame, and imagine that this has magically brought up something interesting in the right hand frame.  You think hat looks interesting so you hit the print button.  You probably expect to get a printout of the page you see, particularly the interesting looking latin text the right hand side.  But what you get (or at least what I get) is a printout of the left hand frame that I last clicked on.

The killer however is that search engine spiders are to this day built around the concept of a page and they just fall apart when they see a frames site. 

So never use frames?  There are cases where frames are useful but they are few and far between.  To summarise

• Frames looked like a good idea and might be useful in some circumstances
• But users can find that they make ordinary operations confusing
• And they can damage your health as far as search engines are concerned.

For most pages on most sites - just say no.