Frame Targets
The
<frame> tag includes an attribute that
allows you to name the frame. A hypertext link in another frame can
load its referenced document into the named frame by using the
target attribute in the
<a> tag. For example:
<frame src="frame.html" name="display_frame">
describes a frame that displays frame.html and is named display_frame. If another frame or window (or even the same frame) contains this link:
<a href="file.html" target="display_frame">
and this link is selected, the file file.html replaces the file frame.html in the frame named display_frame. This is the basic use of targeting frames. A useful example is a book with a table of contents. The table of contents is loaded into a frame that occupies a narrow column on the left side of the browser window. The table of contents contains a list of links to each chapter in the book. Each chapter link targets the frame that occupies the rest of the window. You can then view the chapters while keeping the table of contents available for further navigation.
It can be tedious to specify a target for
every hyperlink in your documents, especially when most are targeted
at the same window or frame. To alleviate this problem, you can use
the target attribute for the
<base> tag in the
<head> of your document. Adding a target to
the <base> tag sets the default target for
every hypertext link in the document that does not contain an
explicit target attribute.
There are a couple of things to note about the use of targets ...
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