Slide 2.20: HTML frames

HTML Frames

With frames, you can display more than one web page in the same browser window. Each HTML document is called a frame, and each frame is independent of the others. The frameset tag includes the following features:

The <frameset> tag defines how to divide the window into frames.
Each frameset defines a set of rows or columns.
The values of the rows/columns indicate the amount of screen area each row/column will occupy.

The disadvantages of using frames are

The web developer must keep track of more HTML documents.
It is difficult to print the entire page.

The example below has a frameset with two columns. The first column is set to 30% of the width of the browser window. The second column is set to 70% of the width of the browser window.

The HTML document 1p.html is put into the first column, and the HTML document 2p.html is put into the second column:

 <frameset cols="30%,70%">
   <frame src="1p.html" />
   <frame src="2p.html" />
 </frameset>

If a frame has visible borders, the user can resize it by dragging the border. To prevent a user from doing this, add the attribute and its value noresize="noresize" to the frame tag. Add the <noframes> tag for browsers not supporting frames.

Tag	Description		Tag	Description
`<frameset>`	Defines a set of frames.		`<frame>`	Defines a sub window (frame).
`<noframes>`	Defines a noframe section for browsers that do not handle frames.		`<iframe>`	Defines an inline sub window (frame).

^†Do not use the body element on a page containing frames. The frames will not work if it is the case.

Demonstration
The following demonstration shows how the HTML script is displayed on the Web.


<html> <head><title>HTML Working Area</title></head> <frameset cols="120,*"> <frame src="http://undcemcs01.und.edu/~wen.chen.hu/course/260/2/tryhtml_contents.html" /> <frame src="http://undcemcs01.und.edu/~wen.chen.hu/course/260/2/frame_a.html" name="showframe" /> </frameset> </html>