I was looking at a website from a friend’s of mine and I saw that he was using frames. At one point of my designing career, I used a lot of frames as well and later I realized the cons of using frames. So, I thought I could just pile up some issues with frames and make it into a post.


1. Permalinks
The link in your address bar will always be of the frameset permalink and not of the actual link. So, you might not have a permanent link at all for some of the links you wanna store. Its difficult to bookmark in those situations, isn’t it?

2. Search Engines Issues
When the search engines crawl through the web finding new links, when they encounter frames, they find a lot of overlapped information for the same URL. This will hinder the search engines to store your domain in the database since the search engine robots would term frames as spam.

3. Slows Down the Browsing Speed
We are in a generation of fast browsing speeds and something that hinders it is something we reject outrightly. Frames slow your browsing speed just because it has to call different webpages from different locations and it has to put the frames in its right place. If you are using a faster computer, you may never see a difference but it matters a lot for people with slower computers.

4. Printing Issues
What you see is not what you print. This is the problem with frames. Printing will be a big hassle just because it tries to print different web pages in different spots of the page and it is messed up. Usually websites that use frames, give a printable version of their webpage because of this problem.

5. Authoring Problems
There are always problems authoring frames and it is not clear why the problems exist. Sometimes, it is just the browsers like IE that don’t decode the code properly causing the web designer to lose sleep.

Alternatives

I don’t like the idea of talking negative of something and not giving alternative options. That’s oxy moronic. I just want to share my experience when I moved away from frames. I started using tables and tables looked great, professional and most importantly it did everything I wanted it to do. I enjoyed working with tables until I started using CSS. CSS can do anything static. I would recommend CSS for all your websites because it is powerful and most importantly very simple. I wrote an article regarding basic CSS tips on this website. Please feel to ask me any questions in this regard and I firmly stand by CSS replacing tables and frames. But I also stand for one more thing, bading goodbye to frames, once and for all. It was good knowing you…

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