[Chapter 2] 2.11 Frames

2.11 Frames

Anyone who has had more than one application window open on their graphical desktop at a time can immediately appreciate the special, nonstandard feature of HTML offered by Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer: frames. For more information on frames, see Chapter 12, Frames.

Figure 2.6 is an example of a frame display. It shows how the document window may be divided into many individual windows separated by rule lines and scroll bars. What is not immediately apparent in the example, though, is that each frame may display an independent document, and not necessarily HTML ones, at that. A frame may contain any valid content that the browser is capable of displaying, including multimedia. If the frame's contents include a hypertext link the user selects, the new document's contents, even another frame document, may replace that same frame, another frame's content, or the entire browser window.

Figure 2.6: Frames divide the window into many document displays

[Graphic: Figure 2-6]

Frames are defined in a special HTML document in which you replace the <body> tag with one or more <frameset> tags that tell the browser how to divide its main window into discrete frames. Special <frame> tags go inside the <frameset> tag and point to the documents that go inside the frames.

The individual documents referenced and displayed in the frame document window act independently, to a degree; the frame document controls the entire window. You can, however, direct one frame's document to load new content into another frame. Selecting an item from a table of contents, for example, might cause the browser to load and display the referenced document into an adjacent frame for viewing. That way, the table of contents always is available to the user as he or she browses the collection.