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Actually, frames were ugly, limited and not really ergonomic but they weren’t a wrong pattern.

They solved a real problem of having parts of the page that changes and other parts that didn’t. It’s a shame they were deprecated without a modern replacement.

An "include" mechanism (like what html provides) should have been proposed to replace this use case.

The deprecation of frames forced dynamic websites (wether it is client or server side) on everyone and i feel like it is in part responsible of why people stopped to handcraft websites.




> Actually, frames were ugly, limited and not really ergonomic but they weren’t a wrong pattern.

They were. The most fundamental part of the WWW architecture is the URL. URLs are more important than even HTML or HTTP. Without addressability, the web doesn’t work.

Frames break URLs because you can visit a site that uses frames, navigate around the site, and the URL won’t change. You can’t link to the place you arrive at. Frames break addressability and this makes them go completely against the grain of the WWW. Flash and Java applets were fundamentally at odds with the WWW architecture as well for the same reason.


There were workarounds to load a direct link to a frame so that it loaded properly in the frameset. If you visited a site that did not do that, then they were just not trying as hard.


This is true, but back then we didn't have the JS History API so navigating throughout a frame-based website would never update the URL in the address bar to reflect where the user is.

Whether or not you see it as a big deal is up to you, but I personally have vivid memories of receiving links from users who were trying to share or show me a particular page, only to realize that they had copied the address bar's content of a framed website.


> Actually, frames were ugly, limited and not really ergonomic but they weren’t a wrong pattern.

I used frames to do holy grail lite layout with static header/footer with the main body being the part that continued to update. The footer remaining the same was the only way I could get our early "radio station" to continue playing with the user navigated the site so that the music wasn't interrupted. This was so old, it was using an embedded Real Player. As for ugly, there were no borders from the frameset.


>> It’s a shame they were deprecated without a modern replacement.

Isn't iframe the replacement? iframe is not deprecated.




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