The Frames feature of Netscape 2.0 is a powerful way of organizing material for web page, and with a bit of practice isn't terribly complex. Many of the organizational features of tables are extended with frames. A key benefit of using frames is that if you want to have consistent elements (for example a navigation bar), you can load the consistent elements into one frame, and not have to reload them over and over again.

Beware, however, that only users with Netscape 2.0 or later will be able to view documents that use frames. Frames have also gotten a bad rap for having a confusing user interface. The main problem was that frames did not allow the user to go back within a frame. This problem was solved in Netscape 3.0. Clicking and holding inside a frame will go back within that one frame, instead of to the document viewed before the entire frameset was loaded.

Documentation

Here is a beginning primer of the syntax of the frames tags.
And here is some updated info in the Navigator 3.0 release notes.
Info on the TARGET attribute.
Microsoft's new HTML documentation.

Methodology

The most important things to do when working with frames are to plan the layout of your document ahead of time, and to properly construct the URLs for all of the component pages.

Things to think about: the main document which contains frames should be designed carefully ahead of time, does it contain horizontal bands which stretch from margin to margin? If so, use the

Another thing to think about is that the elements of a frame document are all individual HTML pages. Plan out your supporting pages ahead of time.

So when you are about to design a set of frames, do things in this order:

1. Sketch your layout.
2. Create the necessary framesets.
3. Create your individual pages.
4. Decide on the look you want for your frames.

A slightly more complicated example.
One more example.

Remember that not all browsers can display frames. They are not even part of the HTML specification, and are supported primarily by Netscape and Microsoft. In order to assure that the pages you create will show something to viewers with non-frames-enabled browsers, you should make use of the NOFRAMES tag. The noframes tag will act as a container for an HTML page which will be shown as an alternative to the FRAMESET page. Older browsers ignore the frames information, and display only the HTML which is inside the NOFRAMES tag. Check out the source of this page for an example.

Troubleshooting tips:

• Reloading a frames document reloads the individual pages of the frames, but not the top-level holder document.
• Name your frames so that targeting windows can be more precise.
• If you want to View Source on a document held in a frame, click once in the document to highlight that window, then choose View Frame Source from the View menu.

Floating Frames

Microsoft has developed a variant on the FRAME structure called IFRAME, aka "floating frames." This is a way to nest a frame within the body of a normal HTML document. This does not require the normal FRAMESET/FRAME structure.

Basic syntax takes the form of:

• This tag is only supported by MSIE 3.0 or later.
• Frameborder takes value of 1 or 0, as in true or false.
• The documentation says that you need a close tag, though I've gotten it to work without one.

If in your tag you include a NAME parameter, you will find that you can target links to a particular window of a frame. This is very functional and nice, and you should get in the habit of using this feature so that you can take more advantage of it with JavaScript later.

Targets can be used in the following tags:

• BASE - If you want all the links in a page to be targeted to the same location.
• A HREF - For targeting an individual link.
• AREA - For use in a client-side imagemap link.

• _blank - Cause the linked files to load in a new blank window.
• _top - Cause the linked files to load outside of the frames structure.
• _self - Link loads in the same window as the anchor.
• _parent - Link loads in the window one level up.

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