Frames used to be cool
If you’ve been surfing the web for more than a few years, you may remember the days when seemingly every Web site was constructed using frames. I built more than a few of those myself. On the surface they seemed to be an ideal solution to many of the problems both coders and marketers had with non-framed sites. For coders it meant you didn’t need to copy your navigation, headers and footers into every single page – saving you lots of time. For marketers, it meant that your menus. logos and other branding information was always viewable by your site’s visitors, no matter how much scrolling they did. In the days of Yahoo and other directory pages, it was a perfect way to build pages.
Then came the next generation of search. Instead of relying on human provided data to build a huge list of web pages, these new search indexes used “robots”, “spiders” and “crawlers” to automagically navigate the internet. Following links, they located pages and read their content dynamically. This is when using Frames become a bad way to build pages.
