Frames

By using frames, you can jazz up your home page as well as organize it when you start to accumulate a large amount of information.
The best way to explain frames is by example (as is most of HTML and computer science in general). Take a look at the CS1 homepage. There is a link called ``Frames''. Click on that to see what frames can do.

The basic frame setup consists of a parent frame and two or more child frames. All of these frames are no more than HTML documents, but the parent frame has some extra stuff - it describes what document gets displayed in which frame.

frame_parent.html

<html>
<head>
<title>Frame Example</title>
</head>

<frameset cols="25\%,*" >
<frame name="leftside" src="frame_child1.html">
<frame name="rightside" src="frame_child2.html">
</frameset>

<noframes>
No frames, huh?  Too bad - go download Netscape 2.0 or better...
</noframes>

The line <frameset cols="25%,*" > says that there are going to be two frames - two columns to be exact. The first frame takes up 25% of the width, and the second frame takes up whatever is left over.
The line <frame name="leftside" src="frame_child1.html"> says that the HTML file called
``frame_child1.html'' is displayed on the frame named ``leftside''.
The line <frame name="rightside" src="frame_child2.html"> says that the HTML file called ``frame_child2.html'' is displayed in the frame named ``rightside''.
The stuff in the <noframes>...</noframes> tag is what is displayed the someone's browser (or equivalent of Netscape) cannot support or handle frames.

When you use links inside of a frame, you must tell the <a href=...</a> tag where to display the the file that it is linked to. You do this by adding the ``target'' attribute to the <a href=...</a> tag, like this :

<a target="rightside" href="mp.html">Monty Python</a> - displayed on the right side<p>
<a target="leftside" href="mp.html">Monty Python</a> - displayed on the left side<p>
<a target="_top" href="mp.html">Monty Python</a> - displayed on the "top"<p>

The argument to target (like ``rightside'', ``leftside'', or ``_top'') is the name of the frame to displayed the file that you linked to. Since the parent frame doesn's have a name explicitly declared, you can ``_top'' to refer to the parent. Play around with the links on the frames document from the CS1 home page. What happens when you use the back button.
If you have a frames-based page being viewed in Netscape and you click on ``View'' from the menu, and then click on ``View Source'' (or ``Document Source'' - depending on which version of Netscape you're using) you'll see the code for the parent frame. Netscape 3.0 allows you to ``View Frame Source'' to see the HTML code for the active frame, but I don't think Netscape 2.0 has this feature. Can you figure out a way around this?