Frames

[BobTheCrate]

Why do HTML 'frames' attract so much disdain from certain factions within the IT world ?

Think I even read somewhere that the W3C was going to drop frames ? Or maybe that was just wishful thinking from the author.

Sure a web site 'littered' with unnecessary frames is bad. However why should intelligent use of frames be also considered bad or so awful ?

[HappyBaggie]

Littering anything with anything unnecessary is bad, but there are plenty of genuine reasons why pretty well all major web sites no longer use them.

Search engines don't like them, it's hard to bookmark or link to individual pages, there are accessibility problems for some users and browsers, and there are copyright issues when external pages get linked and appear as part of your site.

Most of these can be got around in some way, but the effort involved is much greater than using scripts or even simple SSIs to handle the navigation without frames.

[xoggoth]

Another irritating thing on some (at least I think this is due to use of frames) is when the back button keeps taking you to previous frame instead of out of the webtulipe altogether. Microsoft's own technical pages are an example.