Frames - i think?

juror

I'm working on a website at the moment, and I want to get frames working within the site to avoid the complete reload of a screen each time a link is selected, but I want to get frames working like this ... National Aquatic Centre
or here Italian Weddings

Where the top frame appears to be within a table and the table does not take up the whole width of the screen.
Does anyone know how to create this effect? As far as I can see frames cannot go within tables, so am I misunderstanding how this is being done?

Thanks

Goodshape

You could have a look at the source code for the pages you like and try to reverse-engineer the effect.

There are no frames being used on either of the pages you linked to, btw, so I'm not really sure what you're looking for.

louie

Frames are not a very good idea.
Same or even better option will be using AJAX to reload the content without a complete page refresh.

Eoin

Would you still be able to bookmark and navigate a site properly (using the browser history) with AJAX?

Just go with normal pages - no need to over complicate things for the sake of it.

louie

Yes "EOIN" you can still bookmark and make use of the browser history with AJAX.
This was an issue few years back but not anymore.

My recommendation would be using normal created pages with a DB back-end, and if done right, page loading shouldn't be an issue.

Eoin

Do you know any good demo sites out there? It's obviously been a while since I looked at this. By the way, why did you put my name in quotes - (that is my real name)?

Edit - demo sites specifically around the AJAX and navigation.

tomED

God, please don't use Frames - so bad for so many reasons.

mewso

louie wrote: »

Yes "EOIN" you can still bookmark and make use of the browser history with AJAX.
This was an issue few years back but not anymore.

It is still an issue that a good developer will should deal with. It hasn't magically disappeared there are just good ways of adding this functionality with Ajax.

Using frames in this day and age to reduce the page loading time is not a good enough reason anymore when you take browser caching, average speed of access of a user and good web page development (i.e. non-bloated html) leading to light weight pages that load quickly.

Everyone seems to think Ajax is the magic word these days when a simple consistent light-weight template (with no frames) will probably work fine for 99% of visitors unless you plan to embed bmp images in it.

louie

eoin wrote:

Do you know any good demo sites out there? It's obviously been a while since I looked at this. By the way, why did you put my name in quotes - (that is my real name)?

Edit - demo sites specifically around the AJAX and navigation.

Not of the top of my head (or Google Mail could be a good example) but there are many powerful AJAX framework out there, e.g. YUI ( by Yahoo), etc.
Regarding the quotes, is just a habit of highlighting the "NAME" I am refering to (other do @NAME)

I like working with AJAX framework, and I have been using it a lot in my projects but mainly for forms (dependent select menus, login verification), small parts that needs to be loaded into the page content that I don't usually want the SE to spider anyway, etc...

tricky D

@juror

They're not actually frames. It's just that all those pages use the same graphics at the top. So the browser, instead of going all the way out onto the net and asking the server for the image again, says I already just used that and have a copy here in my cache, so I'll save some time instead of doing another round trip and use the copy. As a result the graphic looks as if it stayed there all along.

The cache is a folder on your pc with a copy of the pages, graphics and other stuff that you recently visited so that the browser can save time like above.