Dreamweaver MX: The Missing Manual

Chapter 7. Frames

The Web-page elements known as frames are both alluring and confusing. They’re alluring because they can display multiple Web pages in a single browser window—one independent Web page per frame. Clicking a link may change the page in one frame, while leaving the contents of all the other frames untouched.

Frames offer an easy way to compartmentalize different elements within a single browser window. For instance, you can create separate pages for navigation, banners, and articles. Each can appear in its own frame, with its own scroll bars (see Figure 7-1).

Figure 7-1.  Frames let you keep one element in place—the banner and navigation bars shown here, for example (http://www.mnh.si.edu/africanvoices/) while other contents of the Web page change. This way, the banner and the navigation bar remain visible in one frame, even as your reader scrolls to read a long page full of text or even reloads the page in another.

At the same time, frames can be confusing to build, since they require a multitude of Web pages—including a special master page called a frameset—to work. People who create Web pages by typing pure HTML code into a text editor soon discover that building frames-based Web sites can be a frustrating exercise in file management. Dreamweaver MX, on the other hand, reduces much of this complexity by providing special Frames tools in the Insert bar’s Frames tab ...