Frames For Dummies - Blogring.net

Sweet_As_An_Elf · 07-28-2006, 08:00 PM

Hello! This is Chandra and I'm going to give you a little walkthrough on frames. They're pretty simple, actually, but you don't have to be a dummy to not get them. I can't even code a Xanga layout yet, so this is my first contribution.

What are frames?
Frames are webpages within webpages. You can divide a webpage to have parts of others within them. Like, you could put a box on your webpage using frames to have this webpage in it. Pretty cool, eh?

What are they used for?
Frames are typically used to divide your webpage up and make it easier to navigate. You can make a page that has your affies on one smaller box on the left, a bigger box containing your main content in the center, and another smaller box containing a webpage with a navigation on your right. Example: [Only registered and activated users can see links. ].

-Preparations-
Make sure you have three pages, their names should be: index.htm, main.html, and left.html. Make the background on your main page pink and your left page cyan so that you can see where each page is placed.

-Breaking Down The Code-
Make this the code for your index.htm page.

Code:

<HTML>
<HEAD><TITLE>Page Name</TITLE></HEAD>
<frameset cols=*,80%**border=0>
<frame src=left.html name=left
scrolling=auto marginwidth=0 marginheight=0 noresize=yes>
<frame src=main.html name=main
scrolling=no marginwidth=0 marginheight=0 noresize=yes>
</frameset>
</HTML>

TITLE
I'm pretty sure you already know what this is... Just change "Page Name" to whatever you want index.htm to be named, such as "My Frame Site" or something like that.

COLS
Cols is short for columns. This means you're dividing index.htm vertically. You can also do rows instead if you want to divide it into horizontal frames, but we'll stick with these for now. The asterisk (*) means that this page (left.html) will take up whatever the other one doesn't. That happens to be 20% of the page, because (as shown there) the other page will be taking up 80%.

FRAME SRC
The "frame src" attribute is a lot like the "img src" attribute I'm sure you're all familiar with. What follows the equals sign (=) is where the webpage you're wanting to put in that particular frame can be found. If you want to, change "left.html" to "http://www.blogring.net/index.php". If you do, you'll see that the left section of your page now has Blogring.net's homepage within it. Cool, huh?

NAME
Name is just what it sounds like. You just name the different frames so that, when you're editing the code, it's easier to know which one you're fiddling with.

SCROLLING
You shouldn't really mess with this. It just makes sure that, when you put in more content on the frame than can fit into it's designated space, you can scroll to view the rest of it. Just like with div layers.

MARGINWIDTH/MARGINHEIGHT
This is self-explanatory. If you want, you can resize the margins, but I never really feel the need to.

NORESIZE
This decides whether or not you let the viewer of index.htm change the size of the frames on it. If you're making a layout that requires a certain size for all frames, put "yes", so that others cannot tamper with it and screw up their viewing experience.

Well, gee, that wasn't too hard, was it? Just to warn you: search engines simply LOATHE frames. Besides that, they're pretty handy. Thank you for reading this and feel free to PM me with any questions! =)

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