Why use framesets

Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. They're useful any time you want to mix in a document from another security context, or without the scripting and styles that the parent page is using. There was a limited use case for them keeping hold of large amounts of page content that you don't want to reload on each navigation.

There are legitimate uses for iframes, where there's no reason to use frames today with modern browsers. Use iframes only when embedding the whole site is the most logical option.

Although rare, there are occasions when this makes sense. This is a legitimate reason. Say you have a product edit form and inside this form you have an area with another form that let's say allows you to enter a list of the customers to send a newsletter for this product. Customers are not related to the product at all and has no database relation to a product.

They are compliantly separate entities from product. In this case I crate an IFrame with a customer adding form and submit button that submits the form inside IFrame. I didn't find any better way to implement the described scenario than using IFrame.

And yes, I have a requirement to have both forms on the same page, and newsletter form should be placed inside product editing form. Business need dictated by bosses. You can use an iframe to give access to ads from third parties in your website without giving them any additional control or messaging to the parent document that contains the iframe. The presentation of the frameset must be defined within the parent document containing the frameset. Just as with any webpage, the contents of each frame can be styled with CSS.

In order to style the contents of each frame, the styles must be added to the source document itself either by linking to an external stylesheet within the source document or by adding internal or inline styles to the source document. Considering our four source documents, CSS styles have to be applied to each document individually. Applying CSS styles to the webpage that contains the frameset will not cause those styles to apply to each individual document. There are a few things you can do to affect the presentation of a frameset beyond styling the documents themselves.

Instead, they are made by adding attributes and values to the frame elements. Frames can be sized either in pixels or percentages, or they can be set to automatically adjust in size based on the available space. To specify the size of a frame, insert the desired value in the cols or rows attribute. By default, unless the attribute noresize is added to a frame, website visitors can use their mouse to drag the border between two frames to resize the frames.

If this is undesirable, the attribute noresize can be applied to a frame element to prevent resizing. Now that we have our layout defined, we can increase or decrease the margin between the frames and also remove the border between the frames if we wish to do so. The marginheight attribute applied to the first frame will add 15px of margin above and below the content loaded in the first frame. The frameborder value of 0 removes the borders from around the three bottom frames.

One of the most common uses of frames is to build sticky navigation into a frame that is always visible regardless of the position of the contents of the other frames. When properly implemented, navigation links will cause new resources to load in one frame while the other frames remain static.

Anchors can be formatted to target specific frames by assigning a name attribute to a targeted frame element, and using the target attributed within the a element to load the href in the targeted frame. The first step in making this happen is to assign a name to the frame where we want links to open. Using the layout we created just a minute ago, we would probably want to use the left-hand column for our navigation and the center column as our targeted frame. Search engines have trouble with frames since they don't know what composites of frames to include as navigation units in their index.

Many websites that offer users a choice between regular and framed versions have found that most users prefer frame-free designs. The main issue in using frames is to ensure that URLs keep working. The destination frameset may well have many frames that are identical to the ones in the departure frameset and will be cached in the browser, but by forcing a complete reload in principle, the browser gets a new URL for the destination.

This means that navigation actions e. For example, a very long directory or other alphabetical listing could have a frame on top listing the letters of the alphabet. Clicking one of these letters would cause the listing to scroll within another frame while keeping the user on the same page and thus not destroying navigation.

Frames are also useful for "meta-pages" that comment on other pages. For example, a web design styleguide may need to mix discussions of design principles with live examples of entire pages that follow or break the rules.

In these cases, the embedded page should be treated as an embedded image even though it is implemented as an independent page and the "main" information that users will want to bookmark should be the content of the commenting frame.

Finally, it seems that the inline frames introduced in HTML 4. A frame that is inlined will be subordinate to the main page, and the user can still bookmark the main page and navigate as usual. Since mainstream browsers still do not implement HTML 4. My current best guess is that it will be best to print the currently visible part of a scrolling inline frame in order to maintain the layout of the main page, but some users may want to have the entire contents printed, so messy option settings may be necessary.

In the long term, we will need a richer model for hypertext nodes on the web than can be supported by frames.

For example, composite nodes, typed nodes, hierarchical nesting of nodes, nodes with different views, and nodes with actions that influence other nodes are all ideas that have been explored in hypertext research. In this case wildcard takes remainder of the window. As relative widths of the browser window. This is an alternative to percentages.

You can use relative widths of the browser window. Here the window is divided into sixths: the first column takes up half of the window, the second takes one third, and the third takes one sixth. This attribute works just like the cols attribute and takes the same values, but it is used to specify the rows in the frameset.

You can specify the height of each row in the same way as explained above for columns. This attribute specifies the width of the border of each frame in pixels. A value of zero means no border. This attribute specifies whether a three-dimensional border should be displayed between frames. This attribute takes value either 1 yes or 0 no. This attribute specifies the amount of space between frames in a frameset.