Web Design in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Targeting Frames

One of the challenges of managing a framed document is coordinating where linked documents display. By default, a linked document loads into the same window as the link; however, it is often desirable to have a link in one frame load a page into a different frame in the frameset. For instance, this is the desired effect for a list of navigation links in a narrow frame that loads content into a larger main frame on the page.

To load a new linked page into a particular frame, you first need to assign a name to the targeted frame using the name attribute in the <frame> tag, as follows:

<FRAME SRC="original.html" NAME="main">

Now you can specify that frame by name within any anchor (<a>) tag with the target attribute, as shown in this example:

<A HREF="new.html" TARGET="main">...</A>

The document new.html will load into the frame named “main”.

If a link contains a target name that does not exist in the frameset, a new browser window is opened to display the document, and that window is given the target’s name. Subsequent links targeted to the same name will load in that window.

The <base> tag

If you know that you want all the links in a given document to load in the same frame (such as from a table of contents into a main display frame), you can set the target once using the <base> tag instead of setting the target within every link in the document (saving a lot of typing and extra characters in the HTML document).

Placing the <base> tag in the <head> of the document, ...