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T
he first time I fully appreciated the power of frames, I was visiting
a site that displayed examples of what the Webmaster considered
“bad” Web pages. The site was essentially a jump-station with a
series of links. The author used a frameset with three frames: one that ran
all the way across the top of the page, displaying a logo and other basic
information; one narrow panel on the left with a scrolling set of links to the
sites themselves; and the main viewing area, which took up two-thirds of
the center screen. Selecting any of the links caused the site to appear in the
main viewing frame.
I was astounded when I finally realized that each frame was truly an inde-
pendent Web page and that you didn’t have to use only Web pages on your
own site—you could link to any page on the Internet. That was when I
also realized the amount of work involved in establishing a frame Web site:
Every page displayed on that site used multiple HTML pages.
Be aware that the use of frames is controversial. Designers opposed to their
use give a number of reasons. One argument is that dealing with frames
often confuses users, especially as they navigate through a site. Another
reason cited by designers is that search engines have difficulty indexing a
frame-based site. Nonetheless, frames are valid HTML, and Dreamweaver
does support their use.
Although the technology enables you to include any page ...