Newbee - Is there any reasons not to use iframe ?

[Desser]

When I made my last website in 2001 it was a no go to use the iframe
property.

I remember how sour it was not to be able to use such a nice working
solution because of bad browser support.

Is there any reasons not to use iframe in the year 2008 ?

 

[Nik Coughlin]

When I made my last website in 2001 it was a no go to use the iframe
property.

I remember how sour it was not to be able to use such a nice working
solution because of bad browser support.

Is there any reasons not to use iframe in the year 2008 ?

What do you want to use it for?

 

[cwdjrxyz]

When I made my last website in 2001 it was a no go to use the iframe
property.

I remember how sour it was not to be able to use such a nice working
solution because of bad browser support.

The current popular browsers seem to support iframe including IE7 and
recent browsers from Firefox, Opera, Seamonkey, Flock, and Safari for
Windows. Officially iframes are not for strict Doctypes such as html
4.01 strict, xhtml 1.0 strict, or xhtml 1.1, but many browsers seem to
work on these strict Doctypes anyway when you include an iframe.
However such strict Doctype pages will not validate at the W3C, if
that troubles you.

Is there any reasons not to use iframe in the year 2008 ?

There are still quite a few who do not like frames or iframes for
various reasons. It is past my bedtime, so I will leave it to others
to make comments on this subject if they wish.

 

[Desser]

Is there any reasons not to use iframe in the year 2008 ?

What do you want to use it for?

I want to use iframe instead of frames.

I want to have the navigation buttons on the left side and when one of the
buttons is pressed by the visitor I want the called page to be shown in the
middle of the page (in my iframe) without leaving the page. Just like it was
commonly used with frames back in the bad old days.

Is there a better way to do this than iframe?

 

[Tim Streater]

The current popular browsers seem to support iframe including IE7 and
recent browsers from Firefox, Opera, Seamonkey, Flock, and Safari for
Windows. Officially iframes are not for strict Doctypes such as html
4.01 strict, xhtml 1.0 strict, or xhtml 1.1, but many browsers seem to
work on these strict Doctypes anyway when you include an iframe.
However such strict Doctype pages will not validate at the W3C, if
that troubles you.


There are still quite a few who do not like frames or iframes for
various reasons. It is past my bedtime, so I will leave it to others
to make comments on this subject if they wish.

In the application I have, I use iframes to contain <selects>s, and
populate them by reloading the iframe. That is, when a choice is made by
the user elsewhere on the page, the <select> is populated according to
the user's choice. In my case this requires going back to the server as
loading all the data when the page is initially loaded doesn't scale.

Advantages: the script on the server does all the work (database
lookups, formatting all the html).

Disadvantages: it might be a deprecated approach. There are some
cosmetic issues I haven't bothered to sort out (the <select> can get
longer and no longer fir properly in the assigned space).


Alternative approach is ajax. Earlier this year I tried this in one of
my iframe apps to see how it might work. At that stage, just a strict
replacement of the functionality.

Advantages: not a deprecated approach Also it looks a lot
smoother, and it could also be that I could integrate the app with the
database a lot better than it is today (i.e., rethink the whole app).
Less html is needed as the <select> is not in a separate page.

Disadvantages: I use optgroups in some of the <select>s, and it was
hard to get these to look the same in various browsers. While several
browsers seemed to refresh nicely if the <select> became wider, MS
Explorer (inevitably) did not, so it looked very messy. I was doing a
lot of the work that the iframe script did on the server side, with
JavaScript on the client side.

(Note, as this is all for a private user group, the client *will* have
JS enabled).

I stopped testing at this point, but I will be looking into ajax a lot
more (not for these apps, though, as I am retiring), as I only scratched
the surface so far.

To the OP: I'd say decide carefully what you want your app to do. You
can use iframes and they ware well supported, but ajax might be a better
approach.

 

[Harlan Messinger]

I want to use iframe instead of frames.

I want to have the navigation buttons on the left side and when one of the
buttons is pressed by the visitor I want the called page to be shown in the
middle of the page (in my iframe) without leaving the page. Just like it was
commonly used with frames back in the bad old days.

Is there a better way to do this than iframe?

Yes, the way almost every professional website you see on the Web is
done: using server-side includes or more even more sophisticated
server-side technologies (ASP.NET, PHP, etc.) to include common elements
(banners, navigation, etc.) on every page without using frame or iframes.

 

[Raymond SCHMIT]

I want to use iframe instead of frames.

I want to have the navigation buttons on the left side and when one of the
buttons is pressed by the visitor I want the called page to be shown in the
middle of the page (in my iframe) without leaving the page. Just like it was
commonly used with frames back in the bad old days.

Is there a better way to do this than iframe?

I still use frames:
- "top-frame" fixed content.
- "left-frame" fixed content containing the menu buttons.
- "rigth-frame" default content is welcome.htm - otherwise depending
on the pressed button in the menu.

I did not know the iframes - is it better than frames ?

 

[richard]

When I made my last website in 2001 it was a no go to use the iframe
property.

I remember how sour it was not to be able to use such a nice working
solution because of bad browser support.

Is there any reasons not to use iframe in the year 2008 ?

http://oldies.1littleworld.com/

A working example of iframes.
I use it mainly so you don't have to switch windows and use the back
button.

You have to look back at the time when CSS was not around. That is now
why frames are evil. So the gurus say. But it also depends on what you
want to present as to their use. IMHO, an iframe is the simplest way
to go. While the main page retains it's data, the iframe page is
changed accordingly.

If you were to design a page that swapped divisional content, the
entire data has to be loaded before the page will work. Which could
take ages. With an iframe, it's a lot easier to swap content and
without scripting.