6 ms·

> Some of deprecated elements won’t render without some extra work, for example <frame> and <frameset> are designed to be used instead of a <body>, for I guess

> Some of deprecated elements won’t render without some extra work, for example <frame> and <frameset> are designed to be used instead of a <body>, for I guess some kind of collage web page made up of other pages. The author is too young to remember frames, huh? :) I'd just link the Wikipedia article ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_(World_Wide_Web) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_(World_Wide_Web) ), but I feel like it doesn't explain it very well. So, to briefly explain -- in the early web (OK, not the really early web, but once it got popular) frames were very common. They were commonly used for menus/sidebars, as well as things like headers that were meant to stay visible. So perhaps a page would have three frames -- a frame up top with a persistent header, one on the left with a sidebar, and then one main frame with the content. Each frame acted fairly independently, with e.g. its own back/forward history (a link in a frame would by default only affect that frame, although you could have links in one frame open in another, useful for implementing a sidebar). This meant using back/forward/reload/etc with frames could be pretty troublesome and unintuitive. If you somehow got a page into a messed-up state where the wrong thing was loaded in one frame, it could be hard to get out of this state other than by navigating to the page from the start. Or it could be troublesome if you accidentally loaded just the content page without the framing page it was supposed to be a part of. CSS got rid of most of the use case for frames, which is good, because frames were a real pain to deal with as a user!

jwells89 3y ago
One usage of frames I recall was for sites that were meant to act as an index of other sites, where there’d be a sidebar on the left with links to various sites that opened on the right. I think this was actually a pretty good use case for frames, especially back before browser tabs existed. It was nicer to run through a list of links in one window with frames than to jump back and forth through history or juggle multiple windows.
- m-p-3 3y ago
  When I was young and still lesrning the basics I used it as a table of content for some long webpages that you could use to quickly jump from one anchor to another, or as a sitemap.
- sjburt 3y ago
  I remember the arms race between these kind of framing sites (often increasingly scammy) and sites that did not want to be framed and had various anti-framing scripts.
- laserDinosaur 3y ago
  I remember a search engine working like that, but I forget it's name. Dog something? It's ground breaking idea was, hey all these search engines kind of suck and you have to go to about 10 of them to find what you want - so what if you enter one search term on our page and we'll Iframe in the results from 10 different search engines! I remember everyone at my university using it for quite a while, then google came out we were floored with the simplicity of it's home page (imagine what ten 1999 yahoo search competitor results crammed into one page looked like :D )
  - midasuni 3y ago
    Dogpile
  - afstr 3y ago
    Dogpile?
    - laserDinosaur 3y ago
      Dogpile! That's it! Oh wow it even has it's own wikipedia page, and it's still online (albeit a very different site now).
  - epiccoleman 3y ago
    Dogpile was the first search engine I ever used. My dad had a buddy who was into tech stuff, who showed us how to use it. Later I learned about AskJeeves from a cousin who showed me how to download emulators and ROMs (this would have been in the mid-late 90s). It's funny to think how much of my early tech experiences came from in person interactions. Dad's friend also built the first computer which I owned, which belonged to my grandma until she got a shinier Dell pre-built for a birthday. I was allowed to "purchase" that machine for the price of two free mows (so $40). This was a steal by any metric. It became the foundation for basically all my computer learning into my preteen and teen years and the centerpiece of my bedroom. I have many fond memories of kicking back in my bedroom with ZSNES or bootleg Family Guy episodes. Idk that I'd really connected until today how much of an influence that friend of my dad's had on my life, just through a few simple acts of thinking the net was cool and sharing with my family.
- tgv 3y ago
  iframe can do that: just change the src attribute.
- gsharma 3y ago
  This reminds me of “frame buster” JavaScript. It was a piece of JS that goes in the site to combat above mentioned behavior and “freed” your webpages from someone else’s content frame.
  - tetris11 3y ago
    Is this the same as now right clicking on an iframe and selecting "Show This Frame Only"?
    - Sniffnoy 3y ago
      No -- the point of a frame-buster script is that it's a script included on a page to force that page out of a frame, it's not something the user runs deliberately.
- account42 3y ago
  The big issue with this any really an use of frames is that you can't bookmark or share the state.
yashg 3y ago
The first website I created on GeoCities back in the 90s used frameset. In exactly the same layout you have mentioned.
mediumsmart 3y ago
Eric Meyer, the king of css still has his old css references in frames pages https://meyerweb.com/eric/css/references/css1ref.html https://meyerweb.com/eric/css/references/css1ref.html
- Thorrez 3y ago
  I get "www.w3.org refused to connect." Is that expected?
  - qingcharles 3y ago
    I guess it is some sort of cross-site security thing. Devtools just says "blocked:other" as the reason for not displaying it.
    - jorams 3y ago
      Firefox on Android actually has a great error message here: > Nightly Can’t Open This Page > To protect your security, www.w3.org will not allow Nightly to display the page if another site has embedded it. To see this page, you need to open it in a new window. > Learn more…[1] > [Open Site in New Window] [1]: Links to https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/xframe-neterror-page https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/xframe-neterror-page
      - b112 3y ago
        Oh my god! You must be very confused now, being told an error message, and some detail about it. Dear end-user, do you need therapy? I'll make sure that message is removed in the next release, so other end-users are not subjected to such horribly frightening information.
        SquareWheel 3y ago
        Chrome shows the following: > Refused to frame 'https://www.w3.org/ https://www.w3.org/' because an ancestor violates the following Content Security Policy directive: "frame-ancestors 'self' https://cms.w3.org/ https://cms.w3.org/".
locusofself 3y ago
Then came iframes, also terrible.
- mtillman 3y ago
  Then came the adtech boom. <img> got things started but a hidden iframe running ads in rotation? That minted fortunes.
dchest 3y ago
https://tintara.tripod.com/FramesSuck.html https://tintara.tripod.com/FramesSuck.html
assimpleaspossi 3y ago
<frame> and <frameset> are now obsolete and not just deprecated and have been so for a number of years. https://html.spec.whatwg.org/dev/obsolete.html#obsolete https://html.spec.whatwg.org/dev/obsolete.html#obsolete

jwells89 3y ago

One usage of frames I recall was for sites that were meant to act as an index of other sites, where there’d be a sidebar on the left with links to various sites that opened on the right. I think this was actually a pretty good use case for frames, especially back before browser tabs existed. It was nicer to run through a list of links in one window with frames than to jump back and forth through history or juggle multiple windows.

m-p-3 3y ago
When I was young and still lesrning the basics I used it as a table of content for some long webpages that you could use to quickly jump from one anchor to another, or as a sitemap.
sjburt 3y ago
I remember the arms race between these kind of framing sites (often increasingly scammy) and sites that did not want to be framed and had various anti-framing scripts.
laserDinosaur 3y ago
I remember a search engine working like that, but I forget it's name. Dog something? It's ground breaking idea was, hey all these search engines kind of suck and you have to go to about 10 of them to find what you want - so what if you enter one search term on our page and we'll Iframe in the results from 10 different search engines! I remember everyone at my university using it for quite a while, then google came out we were floored with the simplicity of it's home page (imagine what ten 1999 yahoo search competitor results crammed into one page looked like :D )
- midasuni 3y ago
  Dogpile
- afstr 3y ago
  Dogpile?
  - laserDinosaur 3y ago
    Dogpile! That's it! Oh wow it even has it's own wikipedia page, and it's still online (albeit a very different site now).
- epiccoleman 3y ago
  Dogpile was the first search engine I ever used. My dad had a buddy who was into tech stuff, who showed us how to use it. Later I learned about AskJeeves from a cousin who showed me how to download emulators and ROMs (this would have been in the mid-late 90s). It's funny to think how much of my early tech experiences came from in person interactions. Dad's friend also built the first computer which I owned, which belonged to my grandma until she got a shinier Dell pre-built for a birthday. I was allowed to "purchase" that machine for the price of two free mows (so $40). This was a steal by any metric. It became the foundation for basically all my computer learning into my preteen and teen years and the centerpiece of my bedroom. I have many fond memories of kicking back in my bedroom with ZSNES or bootleg Family Guy episodes. Idk that I'd really connected until today how much of an influence that friend of my dad's had on my life, just through a few simple acts of thinking the net was cool and sharing with my family.
tgv 3y ago
iframe can do that: just change the src attribute.
gsharma 3y ago
This reminds me of “frame buster” JavaScript. It was a piece of JS that goes in the site to combat above mentioned behavior and “freed” your webpages from someone else’s content frame.
- tetris11 3y ago
  Is this the same as now right clicking on an iframe and selecting "Show This Frame Only"?
  - Sniffnoy 3y ago
    No -- the point of a frame-buster script is that it's a script included on a page to force that page out of a frame, it's not something the user runs deliberately.
account42 3y ago
The big issue with this any really an use of frames is that you can't bookmark or share the state.

yashg 3y ago

The first website I created on GeoCities back in the 90s used frameset. In exactly the same layout you have mentioned.

mediumsmart 3y ago

Eric Meyer, the king of css still has his old css references in frames pages https://meyerweb.com/eric/css/references/css1ref.html https://meyerweb.com/eric/css/references/css1ref.html

Thorrez 3y ago
I get "www.w3.org refused to connect." Is that expected?
- qingcharles 3y ago
  I guess it is some sort of cross-site security thing. Devtools just says "blocked:other" as the reason for not displaying it.
  - jorams 3y ago
    Firefox on Android actually has a great error message here: > Nightly Can’t Open This Page > To protect your security, www.w3.org will not allow Nightly to display the page if another site has embedded it. To see this page, you need to open it in a new window. > Learn more…[1] > [Open Site in New Window] [1]: Links to https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/xframe-neterror-page https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/xframe-neterror-page
    - b112 3y ago
      Oh my god! You must be very confused now, being told an error message, and some detail about it. Dear end-user, do you need therapy? I'll make sure that message is removed in the next release, so other end-users are not subjected to such horribly frightening information.
      - SquareWheel 3y ago
        Chrome shows the following: > Refused to frame 'https://www.w3.org/ https://www.w3.org/' because an ancestor violates the following Content Security Policy directive: "frame-ancestors 'self' https://cms.w3.org/ https://cms.w3.org/".

locusofself 3y ago

Then came iframes, also terrible.

mtillman 3y ago
Then came the adtech boom. <img> got things started but a hidden iframe running ads in rotation? That minted fortunes.

dchest 3y ago

https://tintara.tripod.com/FramesSuck.html https://tintara.tripod.com/FramesSuck.html

assimpleaspossi 3y ago

<frame> and <frameset> are now obsolete and not just deprecated and have been so for a number of years. https://html.spec.whatwg.org/dev/obsolete.html#obsolete https://html.spec.whatwg.org/dev/obsolete.html#obsolete