Structuring HTML with frames
May 19th, 2004
Whilst getting the portfolio section together I revisited the first site I ever built. Unusually, the whole site is structured in frames – and not your usual top, left, centre style frame layout either. I structured everything down to the fine details using a array of frames so convoluted that, for instance, a small border area was defined as a tall thin frame with a background colour.
It now strikes me that this bizarre way of creating structure was a totally novel solution to the problem of layout. I simply wasn’t aware that tables could be used to structure content (the method by which until very recently, virtually all web sites were built). In this vacuum I’d come up with a different but roughly equivalent technique.
Although frames are bad for all sorts of technical reasons, and although the site is awful in many other respects, I do take a crumb of pride that my fresh eyes came up with such an original (although ultimately inferior) take on the problem.