Re: SEUL: Frames on the website

[Chuck Huffman <cbhiii-linux@ic.net>]

At 12:53 PM 10/19/98 EDT, Roger Dingledine wrote:
>An issue I forgot to cover in my last mail: the current website uses
>frames. This is cool, because it's easy to keep organized, and it's
>easy to provide a left-hand navbar for going anywhere in the website.
>This sucks, because, well, frames suck.

Frames suck for a couple of reasons. Users with a small screen (i.e.
640x480) really hate frames because it chews up their precious viewing area
without their permission.

>
>If we make the frames go away, then we:
>* should remove references in our text to "click foo in the navbar to
>  the left"
>* should remove the frames from both www.seul.org/ and www.seul.org/dev/
>

I agree. When writing web pages I believe most text should not rely on
another are or page. If you want to do something like that, then include a
link to where more data can be found.


>If we do this, we need to figure out some way of making the site
>navigatable easily.
>* Make each page have a frame-like-thingie on the lefthand side. This
>  would be made trivial by sdoc, but sdoc is not a solution we should
>  rely on at this point. We could do it by hand; in particular, we could
>  do it to only "high-level" pages (eg the top level of each hierarchy),
>  and the lower-level pages would be navbarless.

I belive, as Roger suggested, that a frame like main page will do the job
just fine. I used frames on my personal site in the past, but it was a pain
to update the different files instead of the single. I now use a frame like
structure along the top of my page, but it can be done anywhere that we want.

>
>What are the usual solutions that people use for this sort of thing?

Visit CNET.COM. With all of the data that they through at you, they don't
use any frames. It's proof that you don't need them to get a profession and
efficient output of data to visitors. There are plenty of ways to do it. I
have more ideas of my own too.

>Does somebody want to argue the position "we should use frames anyway"?
>

As people have sounded off already.... Frames can go, and we'll still be
alright.

____________________________________________________________
Chuck Huffman                      Huffman Connection Center
mailto:cbhiii-linux@ic.net             http://ic.net/~cbhiii
Mirabilis ICQ # 1224891
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