frame (HTML element)

Description

The frame element defines one particular window within a frameset collection. In a typical frameset construction, one frame might be used for the purposes of navigation, with another frame used for presenting content (the links in the navigation frame would be targeted to load content in the other frame by using a target attribute that matches the destination frame’s name attribute).

Each individual frame in a frameset can have different behaviors/appearance, such as scrolling, the ability to resize the frame boundaries and border style.

Note that the above example shows the XHTML syntax, which requires a trailing forward slash ("/") character to pass as valid XHTML. If the doctype is HTML 4.01 (or earlier), you may express the frame as follows:

<frameset rows="100,*" >
 <frame src="header.html">
 <frame src="home.html">
</frameset>

Using frames/framesets can present additional difficulties for users when bookmarking pages. If you use the menu option to do this, or a keyboard shortcut, which page is it going to store as a favourite - the framed content or frameset as a whole? To be absolutely sure, the user has to right click (or CTRL click for Mac users) on the frame that needs to be added as a favourite and choose from that menu. Printing pages is also not quite as straightforward (do you want to print the whole frameset or just one portion?). Finally, navigating around the pages using keyboard only can be cumbersome, for example tabbing through navigation on one frame, then tabbing to another frame to read content, then back to the navigation frame, and so on.

An additional note about search engines - if the content is intended to be viewed within a framed context and the page comes up in search results, when the user clicks to view that page they will not see it in the context that it was originally intended - they become somewhat ‘orphaned’. You may therefore need to incorporate a ‘View this page in frameset’ link for this eventuality, which will almost certainly require some JavaScript logic to know first of all that the page is not in a frameset and secondly how to bring it back into a frameset context without losing the page.

Use this for…

A likely scenario for using a frame is where you wish some part of the content to remain constantly loaded (e.g a navigation block) in one frame and have that window open content in another window. It is no longer necessary, however, to use frames (and by implication framesets) for the purposes of creating the visual effect of a header that remains at the top of the page while the rest of the content scrolls - this can be carried out using Cascading Style Sheets.

Compatibility

Every browser listed supports this element type.