In conclusion I can bet I can do a website with Frames and IFrames quicker and have it perform better than your AJAX fancy app.

That said, the problems are the following:
1) SEO
2) Bookmarks of a page can’t be done (I actually know how to do them with #javascript but the average joe will not maintain that)
3) They are “unfashionable”, and considered old. (Without a real understanding of their benefit etc) but you know people don’t like to use their own brain..

So it shouldn’t be used for any “frontend” website. But mainly for CMS or similar Functional website, where the main aim is to be good at what they do, not rank well.

example of a successful frontend:
http://www.zvon.org/xxl/DOM2reference/Output/index.html
(the best Dom2 reference and more)

Valid points.

Frames is bad 99 % of the time. But in PhpMyAdmin they are an easy way to cache the contents of the left panel that - uncached - would cause lots and lots of unnecassary communication between PHP and the DBMS.

A server side cache-solution would be a better solution, but is it worth the effort?

Another use of iframes that is unavoidable today: Rich text editing in Gecko browsers. Script an iframe or edit the entire page!

I’m not entirely sure what you mean, but if I understand this correctly you have the need tp present something from another URL within your web page. If you can’t incorporate that content within your code, you have two options:

You can either use AJAX to dynamically get that content from the other URL or you can, as I think you’re doing right now, include it in an iframe.

edit: and here is my mail again

now, for example imagine this situation:

so… somewhere on site (ex: index.php) there is div where I include 1st.php, now if i click on any link in 1st.php, site have been reloaded, and new site is site which has been goten from the link of 1st.php, and now there is no more my index.php :(, so how could I forget iframes, could I get that all this situation about including doesn’t leave borders of my div, where 1st.php had been included ..

Sory about my nonenglish, and try to answer me on this, this will mean so much to me

BTW) my mail is valid, so . .

In that case, I understand the need for it.

Devon,

Yeah, at least when it comes to position: fixed; it will do the trick in most cases (with necessary IE workarounds).

1. position: fixed.
2. include(’file.htm’);

Why would you need a frame for that? Isn’t an object element for a media player alternatively Flash sufficient for that?

Suppose you use a small flash film to play an MP3 file. You put it somewhere on the page with CSS. Whenever your visitor browses to another page within the site, the player will start playing again from the start. This doen’t happen when the flash file is in a frame.

There are interim solutions when there isn’t time for more thought-through solutions, yes.

Pär,

What I meant with GMail is the whole application feel with updating just certain parts of the web page withouth reloading the entire web page. Then, if HTML e-mails looks weird shouldn’t be because of if AJAX or frames is being used.

But how often it is a requirement is not relevant. It could be used for such purpose.

Well, true enough. It is a scenario wehere frames are ok. Why I think it’s somewhat relevant, though, is that we’re talking about a feature that’s not even used in one per a million web sites, so it feels more like an exception to the rule.

Stephen,

Yeah, maybe, altough most WYSIWYG editors use Midas in Gecko-based web browsers and contenteditable in IE to achieve this effect without using an iframe.

However, one use of an iframe is in a HTML WYSIWYG editor such as the FCKEditor. This creates an iframe and hide the textarea so that you can edit your HTML.

When you say persist the original document, what do you mean? To have one part of the web page constant while updating another? In that case, AJAX or something similar (thinking GMail here) sounds better to me.

In my opinion GMail is a perfect example where you should not use JS/Ajax when displaying emails. I mean GMail is a great service and has a lot of nice features but the way it displays HTML emails is horrifying. Of course you could argue about using HTML emails. But mainly because it strips out a lot of my “good” HTML witch leads to quirky HTML hacking.

When it comes to displaying two document beside each other, how often is that a requirement?

As said, leave closed systems and CMS out of this conversation. But how often it is a requirement is not relevant. It could be used for such purpose.

Hmm, I see. Thanks for the example.

Jeena,

Why would you need a frame for that? Isn’t an object element for a media player alternatively Flash sufficient for that?

Tanny,

First, I’d say that I personally think I prefer JavaScipt/AJAX solutions in those cases its necessary (and possible) to get content from another URL, and then only offer some kind of framed alternative to those that don’t support JavaScript.

But I agree, I can’t guarantee what’s the best alternative in every given scenario either.

When it comes to ads in web pages, and most notably Google ads that are all over the web and consists of a JavaScript that creates an iframe through document.write. I’m not a big fan of such a solution and I would prefer a DOM implementation where one would specify the id of the element where to input the ad content. A better, more unobtrusive approach.

Olly,

For versioning, I definitely buy using frames.
Same with live preview. But in most products and web sites, comparing versions and live previews are fairly rare.

Adam,

Usually the HTML is, and should be, so very slim nowadays with all CSS and JavaScript externally included and cached, so in most cases I don’t think it would be so bad.

And the accessibility and usability lost on having frames is too big of a reason to use them, in my opinion.

Johan,

No, nostalgia is not a valid reason.

Or to defeat bugs (eg the IE Z-INDEX BUG WITH SELECT INDICES) with a buggy thing that is frames?

I think the main advantage of frames is that they maintain state.

For instance, you can have a navigation frame maintain it’s state easily, where as if you were using a CSS navigation menu you would have to update it on each page refresh.

So you’ve got advantages in the fact they allow for less redundant code (navigation in this example), which means faster access times, as well as reducing development time (updating CSS menu classnames, etc).

That said, I haven’t used a frameset in years and years after moving over from the “dark” side. Iframe’s seem to be making a comeback, maybe framesets are next?

When it comes to displaying two document beside each other, how often is that a requirement?

We have a CMS that does versioning and allows you to bring up two versions of a document side-by-side, to visually compare them. It’s a very useful tool and one of the very few decent uses for frames.

Are we including iframes here? Wordpress’s live preview is a great example of a good iframe.

Or how about an email application, is it really better to use AJAX or would frames do the same thing? I don’t know but don’t screen readers get informed when a frame has loaded? Isn’t that more accessible than AJAX which doesn’t inform the screen reader? I know that accessibility is not all about screen readers and I know that you can’t bookmark a page in frame, but sometimes you don’t want the user to bookmark a page. You want them to go through the steps to get the data.

At work in 1999, I wrote a web front end for the email system we use. There are many users who had over a 1,000 folders in their email database. AJAX or a frame can be used to load the folder’s data. Or in our worse case you can load the whole page with 3,000 plus folders in a tree, use complicated javascript to open the tree to the current folder which is now five pages below the list of items in the folder so the user has to scroll up to see the data or scroll down to see where the folder is in the tree. Use a frame and this isn’t a problem.

I have seen to many abuses of frames, like using a frame so that a banner with simple navigation is always on top. I believe that 99.9 percent of web sites most likely don’t need and shouldn’t use frames (not talking about iframes here). As long as there are advertisements on web pages, I don’t think that iframes are going to disapear.