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One phrase caught my attention saying "No frames now!" in a few variations. Were frames a disputed feature at one time?

by jFriedensreich 2y ago

rendx 2y ago
Aren't they still, or rather, almost completely dead and gone?
- hatsuseno 2y ago
  I wouldn't say dead and gone, tabular data is still a thing.
- tiagod 2y ago
  Still used to embed YouTube videos in a page, for example.
  - pjc50 2y ago
    Iframes are not <frameset>. Frameset really is dead now you can have CSS fixed left and top headers.
theshrike79 2y ago
Frames were used because server side rendering of partial pages was sometimes a massive pain. There was no fancy React DOM that could refresh just the relevant bits. In these cases you just added a frame and you could click through content and the navigation would stay in place. ...but then, like always, people went overboard and pages started to have 42 frames within frames within frames and it made everything painful.
- 2mlWQbCK 2y ago
  Even when reasonably sensibly used the result was a page where you could not bookmark sub-pages (important at the time, when everyone was still using bookmarks!). This forum thread from 25 years ago that came up near the top when I searched for frame hate was a fun window into a different time with many expressing just why and how much they hated frames: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/why-do-people-hate-html-frames.1045201/ https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/why-do-people-hate-htm... Happily surprised to see that the page linked towards the end of the thread, last modified in 1997, is still online: https://www.htmlhelp.org/design/frames/whatswrong.html https://www.htmlhelp.org/design/frames/whatswrong.html
teddyh 2y ago
IIRC, frames was originally a proprietary Netscape-only feature, at a time when the Netscape browser was proprietary, commercial, and did not support many platforms, and many people therefore used other browsers and/or other platforms which did not support frames.
forgotmypw17 2y ago
As another comment mentioned, frames were originally a proprietary Netscape feature and required special attention to make accessible to any other browser (using the noframes tag and providing links to the framed content, for example). Otherwise, users would just see an empty page (or, worse, a “best viewed with Netscape” message.) Before IE, there were at least two smaller browser “skirmishes”, and this was one of them. One before it was with Mosaic and inline image support, which most browsers did not have at the time (only links to view/download.)

One phrase caught my attention saying "No frames now!" in a few variations. Were frames a disputed feature at one time?

rendx 2y ago

Aren't they still, or rather, almost completely dead and gone?

hatsuseno 2y ago
I wouldn't say dead and gone, tabular data is still a thing.
tiagod 2y ago
Still used to embed YouTube videos in a page, for example.
- pjc50 2y ago
  Iframes are not <frameset>. Frameset really is dead now you can have CSS fixed left and top headers.

theshrike79 2y ago

Frames were used because server side rendering of partial pages was sometimes a massive pain. There was no fancy React DOM that could refresh just the relevant bits. In these cases you just added a frame and you could click through content and the navigation would stay in place. ...but then, like always, people went overboard and pages started to have 42 frames within frames within frames and it made everything painful.

2mlWQbCK 2y ago
Even when reasonably sensibly used the result was a page where you could not bookmark sub-pages (important at the time, when everyone was still using bookmarks!). This forum thread from 25 years ago that came up near the top when I searched for frame hate was a fun window into a different time with many expressing just why and how much they hated frames: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/why-do-people-hate-html-frames.1045201/ https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/why-do-people-hate-htm... Happily surprised to see that the page linked towards the end of the thread, last modified in 1997, is still online: https://www.htmlhelp.org/design/frames/whatswrong.html https://www.htmlhelp.org/design/frames/whatswrong.html

teddyh 2y ago

IIRC, frames was originally a proprietary Netscape-only feature, at a time when the Netscape browser was proprietary, commercial, and did not support many platforms, and many people therefore used other browsers and/or other platforms which did not support frames.

forgotmypw17 2y ago

As another comment mentioned, frames were originally a proprietary Netscape feature and required special attention to make accessible to any other browser (using the noframes tag and providing links to the framed content, for example). Otherwise, users would just see an empty page (or, worse, a “best viewed with Netscape” message.) Before IE, there were at least two smaller browser “skirmishes”, and this was one of them. One before it was with Mosaic and inline image support, which most browsers did not have at the time (only links to view/download.)