Why are HTML frames bad?

Question

I know they are, but my co-worker doesn\'t believe me. He keeps telling me that Google crawls the inside content and caches it just fine. According to Google, it does crawl

Answer 1

I know this is an old thread but..

Been using Frames almost all my life and I think they are great. I still have a few websites using frames and I cannot understand why they are being droppped. Read all of the comments above and disagree with most of them. Problem is most people never bothered to overcome the issues.

1. Link can open in the frame it is enclosed in (e.g. a side pane); Yes it can, but if you do it properly it does not matter. Frames can in fact be very useful for this precise reason, as clicking on a link will only refresh the frame the link it pointing to, not the entire webpage. In the days of dialup modems at very slow speeds this used to be extremely useful to save on bandwidth and make webpages appear superfast. Dont forget, there are still people around the world today (albeit not many) that have very limited internet connectivity at very slow speeds. (people on sailboats in the middle of oceans, those die hards that dial into the internet using HF radio. Oh and those that live in war zones that revert back to poor mobile phone signals, or possibly even need to dial into the internet in another contry using their infrared connections on mobile phones via a modem)

2. can break the forward/backward navigation. Yes it can, but if you do it properly it wont.

3. difficult to bookmark again very easy to overcome, requires very little additional work, but can be easily overcome

4. are not easily searchable (likely to see the content in Google, etc.); break on browsers like Lynx, that are console/terminal based; Already covered by somebody else earlier. Personally I have never even heard of Lynx (apart from the deodarant). In fact it used to be quite useful that pages werent searchable when you did not want to get spammed by bots searching for email addresses... Unfortunately Google or somebody figured out how to do it.

5. Difficult to size properly (e.g. consuming height on widescreen monitors for banner frames); Clearly whoever wrote this has hardly any experience of using frames. This was exactly why I used frames because I could make it work on any screensize in what some would refer to as Fluid views on modern web design

can break with screen readers and magnifiers (for blind users and visual impaired users); I suppose it can if screen reading software and maginfiers are cheap and rubbish and dont know what they are doing, probably them that complained about it, but there are others that manage this easily.

The only argument that I think makes sense, is that people were abusing them. Now I would not know how that was done, as I am not in that game, but I suppose it would be easy to use frames to show a copy of lets say a financial payment page inside another another frame which is completely hidden to make it look like the user is on the correct page. Therefore conning users out of their beer tokens. But I believe more modern webbrowsers have been updated to overcome these issues and not allow re-direction where encryption certificates are used.

I can therefore understand why they would want to restrict the use of frames, but dont understand why they need to completely remove what is a pretty good bit of tech. (Bit like saying we are going to stop people from using 0 when they do math as it causes can sometimes cause problems when you add many 0's together.)

I still have some websites that use frames and wonder when I am going to have to re-code them one day.

PS. also note that google calendar and youtube allow one to imbed pages into websites and both of these use iframes.