Layout - Refactoring HTML: Improving the Design of Existing Web Applications - page 173

content can be missed when a reader sees only part of a frameset.
Potential Trade-offs
The techniques outlined here will not work quite as well in older browsers that are rarely used anymore.
However, the content will still be accessible to them. It just won't be as pretty. In modern browsers, by
contrast, it should be both more attractive and more usable.
The individual nonframe pages may require more bandwidth than the frame equivalents. That's because the
frame content will need to be served to the client on each page.
Mechanics
Frames were a hack in the very early days of the Web before browsers supported CSS or servers supported
sophisticated include schemes. Today a combination of both of these is preferred to achieve a much nicer frame
effect with greater usability.
There are actually two reasons that sites use frames:
To include static content on all pages, without separately editing each page
To present a multicolumn appearance
Although these are legitimate goals, in 2008 neither of them requires the use of frames. You already saw in the
preceding section that it's not hard to create multicolumn layouts with CSS.
It is very common for web sites to have navigation bars or other content that remains the same or almost the
same from page to page. For example, in Java API documentation there are two frames on the left-hand side
that contain a list of all packages and all classes in the current package. The main content frame is on the right.
This is shown in Figure 5.3 .
Figure 5.3. Javadoc frame layout
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