Framing (World Wide Web) - Critique

Critique

Criticism of the practice of framing HTML content includes:

• Framing breaks the link between content and a URL, making it difficult to link to or bookmark a particular item of content within the frameset
• The implementation of frames is inconsistent across different browsers
• Browsers which render material linearly do not handle frames well.
  • Screen reader programs
  • text or audio browsers
  • Email browsers such as Agora
• Framing causes a site to be difficult to index and is detrimental to search engine optimization.
• Framing confuses the boundaries between content on different servers, which raises issues of copyright infringement
• Visitors arriving from search engines may land on a page intended for display in a frame which has no navigation
• Frames change the behavior of the back button.
• Users usually do not expect frames to print the way they do.
• External links on web pages which use frames may cause other pages to appear in the frameset.
• If the screen resolution or browser window size is too low then each frame will have scroll bars which can look messy and uses up already limited space. Such behaviour typically resulted more from bad site design (fixed layouts instead of fluid layouts), whereby not all frameset features were put into proper use.

This behaviour could be mitigated by:

• disabling scrolling for smaller frames that typically didn't require a scrollbar;
• using fluid design characteristics in target pages instead of fixed designs, so that the content wouldn't cause horizontal scrollbars in the first place.

• Large frames with no boundaries can be a security risk ; a frame large enough can be used for phishing.