Creating HTML Frames

Frames are commonly used to isolate thumbnails from larger images, or to isolate a menu from page content. You should be aware before implementing frames that search engines can often be confused by frames, and may not properly crawl sites with frames - check your search engine (Google, Yahoo, etc) for details.

The FRAME tag replaces the <BODY> tag in the HTML document. For example:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>A Frame Document</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<FRAMESET ROWS=“*,*,*”>
<FRAME NAME=”frame1” SRC=”framefile1.html”>
<FRAME NAME=”frame2” SRC=”framefile2.html”>
<FRAME NAME=”frame3” SRC=”framefile3.html”>
</FRAMESET>
</HTML>

Variations

<FRAMESET COLS=”*,*,*,*”> creates column frames
<FRAMESET COLS=”*,2*,*”> the middles frame is twice as large as the other two
<FRAMESET COLS=”*.25,*”> the middle frame is 25 pixels wide
<FRAMESET COLS=”10%,20,70%”> creates frames in indicated ratios

Using targets

<A HREF=”docname.html” TARGET=”frame1”> Link Name</A>
§ This loads the document only in the specified frame
<A HREF=”docname.html” TARGET=”_top”>
§ This loads the document in a new window

Nested Frames

Other Options

<FRAME NAME=”frame1” SRC=”framename1.html” SCROLLING=”no”>
§ Frame1 will not have scroll bars; this is dangerouse because if the document is larger than its frame, users will not be able to view it all
<FRAME NAME=”frame1” SRC=”framename1.html” NORESIZE>
§ Will not let users resize the frame
<FRAME NAME=”frame1” SRC=”framename1.html” MARGINHEIGHT=5 MARGINWIDTH=1>
§ Specify the height and width of buffering margins in pixels