Recently, I wrote a response to a tender, which stipulated that the web site being developed had to adhere to the design standards set out by the Centre for Excellence in Universal Design.

This is a very good website that all web developers and clients purchasing websites should read to consider all aspects of design and accessibility.

One rule I found very strange was a blanket ban on Frames… these days many technologies use iframes to embed content on other sites. For example, if you want to embed a google map on a site (without resorting to utilising the API) the use of frames is practically unavoidable and actively encouraged by Google. There are also other reasons to use frames, for example if a site has a flash header / menu that you do not wish to reload on each page an iframe could be used to display the content.

Frames by themselves are not evil, though I accept the point that they should no longer be used to maintain common header/footer/navigation sections of sites as at this stage there are plenty of technologies accessible to web designers to make segments of code accessible to all pages of the site (php, ssi, javascript, ajax etc.). However, to just blanket ban them is also wrong.

Finally, I just wanted to address the additional problems mentioned on the site, which, for me, do not seem objective.

• Not all browsers are frames capable
  • this is true, but you’d be hard pushed to find one that isn’t.
• People generally do not like them
  • What a statement to make, I don’t think most end users would even know if a site used them so maybe by people the author meant web developers don’t like them because of the other problems mentioned in the document.
    
• Search engines can have problems
  • This is true, but this is something that a sitemap can address for any web technology that search engines have problems with, the major problem search engines have is that they can return inner pages, so users that find the site may end up visiting a page without the navigation bar or header or whatever.
• They are more difficult to update
  • This point doesn’t make any sense to me, I would suggest frames are easier to update as they break code into more discrete, modular parts, making a website more manageable and easier to maintain, however, these days you can get these advantages through back end technologies such as server side includes, php, and client side technologies such as javascript.
• They can cause issues when trying to link to them
  • I presume that the author is talking about setting the target frame when adding links to the site. Most web developers would not see this as an issue though as it is how the technology operates.

All in all, the site is great but I think in this instance they simply fluffed out the document with points that don’t make much sense.

I’ve heard many developers over the years suggesting that frames and tables are an evil part of html, but, in truth, they have their uses.