Frames Are Amazing!



  • This was sent to my by an old co-worker, glad I no longer work there: 

     
    This is Gary's answer to my problem importing Word html into my template. At this point, I don't know what to do. I've never used frames.

    Hi *******,

    I looked at your code.  Here is the problem.  You are not using frames or CSS to mimic frames.  This is not your fault.  You were taught not to use frames in your class.  

    There is a lot of misinformation in the information industry.  This common idea that frames are bad is a perfect example.  With the WWW, from here on out and especially in multimedia WWW applications, frames are your friend.  Use them always.  Get good at framing.  That is wisdom from Gary.

    The problem most website designer have is that they do not recognize that the WWW, at its core, is framed.  Pages are frames.  As we want to better link pages, then we must frame these pages.  Since you are not framing pages, then my pages, or anybody else's pages will interfere with your code (even when the people tell you that it can be locked - that is a lie).  Sections in a single html page cannot be locked.  Pages read in frames can be.  

    Therefore, the solution to this specific technical problem, and every technical problem that you will have in the future with multimedia, is framing.  

    Again, *******, you have done nothing wrong.  You were just taught a lie.  Frames are the answer, by explicit design.

    What I would do is open MS Word and create the frame page, testing it in Word, because it's very easy to do (high level of productivity - once you know how).  Then I'd use Word to export the frame page called Index.html to HTML, to strip out all of the not needed code.  That does the framing part.  Then I'd use my existing multimedia development tools to create the pages that are called within my fixed structured frames.  These pages can be developed by anyone, using anything, from anywhere.  My frame controls their access, use, and display.

    In this way, you can have your cake and eat it too.  In this way, you can sub-page, via frames, a single screen display.  In this way you can introduce multimedia without difficulty.  In this way, your pages can be social (they can work with other peoples pages).  In this way you can secure some pages, with true security, and not others.
     
    In short, the entire industry is wrong on the framing issue and Gary is right.  This happens a lot to me.  Framing solves this problem and every other multi-page, multi-page source, and multi-media WWW development job.  That is why frames are your friend.

    Hope this helps.  Let me know what you decide to do.  I will help, if you frame, because it's the only solution; now and into the future.  –gary


    The dribble continues after she protested:
     

    Hi *******,

    Yes, this happens to me all the time.  I am right and the entire Industry is wrong.  I know it is hard to believe.  You will find this out, on this frame issue, as time ensues.  This is not an ego thing for me.  I do not need anyone's accolades.  It is just the technical truth, well told.  Frames securely mediate, by design.  Secure multi-mediation is the future of all webbing.

    You tell me there are two frame problems: handicap access and book marking.  Even if true (I'd need to research), these are not the key issues.  The key issues are as I laid out in the first email on this.

    There are two problems with frames.  First, people do not know how to frame.  Second, all pages must be securely and consistently served.  Here is what I mean: if your server is down, and you have a full page, then that full page is not sent and you get the 404 error message.  With frames, you can get that error on just a frame.  So, if you have three frames, then if your server is not secure, you have three times the opportunity to get the 404 error message.  Therefore, to use frames (an advanced mediation capability), you must be smarter and more secure.

    On your very insightful issues:

    1. Item one, can you make them drop-up menus?  That is my first idea.  If not, if you do not like that idea, I will look further.

    2. Item two, place variable width frames on either side, with your background star image.  Then place Tim's work in center as a fixed width frame of the pixels you so desire.  So the top frame is three side-by-side frames.  Then the middle work frame has other frames.  This is called the windowing of frames.  That is how you want to now think about all multimedia website design, especially with multiple team authors.

    Again, I'm here to help.  Just send me any problem that you have.  I feel your energy and intelligence on this.  It's a pleasure working with you.  -gary

     

     



  • Is this Gary a "Gary Smith" or a "Gary Nahasapadeknahadeepnamak?"



  • @djork said:

    Is this Gary a "Gary Smith" or a "Gary Nahasapadeknahadeepnamak?"

     

    what's with all the racial comments on this site lately??



  • @PerdidoPunk said:

    @djork said:

    Is this Gary a "Gary Smith" or a "Gary Nahasapadeknahadeepnamak?"

     

    what's with all the racial comments on this site lately??

     

    They took urrrr jaawwwbsss!!!!! 


  • Considered Harmful

    Samir Nagheenanajar.



  • Gary has completely lost it, I'm afraid.



  • Gary is an interesting fellow, he claims to be on the same level of intelligence as aristotle/plato, only spoken to him once and that was enough for me.



  • Secure multi-mediation is the future of all webbing.

     My God, that's brilliant. Has Gary considered advancing to the Sales Team?
     



  • @PerdidoPunk said:

    @djork said:

    Is this Gary a "Gary Smith" or a "Gary Nahasapadeknahadeepnamak?"

     

    what's with all the racial comments on this site lately??

    Well there are two explanations for Gary's writing: He's insane and English is not his first language, or he's insane and a complete moron. I'm just trying to give him the benefit of the doubt.



  • djork, I can 100% assure you that gary is an 50ish white guy who grew up in the midwest, speaking english as his first language, who up until recently was a professor (if you can call him that) for bryant college.



  • I am right and the entire Industry is wrong.

    He says this, but why does he still need a beating from the clue stick? 



  • @blindsleeper said:

    djork, I can 100% assure you that gary is an 50ish white guy who grew up in the midwest, speaking english as his first language, who up until recently was a professor (if you can call him that) for bryant college.

     

    that's what i grokked from his writing style. reminds me of some people i've met.



  • @blindsleeper said:

    ... was a professor (if you can call him that) for bryant college.

    That explains EVERYTHING ... the delusions of grandeur, the ridiculous outdated and impractical technical advice ...



  • I am right and the entire Industry is wrong.

    Deserves an ignobel.



  • And what happens to your own personal frames? I
    just the other day got... a frame was sent by my staff at 10
    o'clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why?



  • @obediah said:

    @PerdidoPunk said:
    @djork said:

    Is this Gary a "Gary Smith" or a "Gary Nahasapadeknahadeepnamak?"

     

    what's with all the racial comments on this site lately??

     

    They took urrrr jaawwwbsss!!!!! 



  • A stunning piece of complete nonsense.

    Curiously enough, one part is right: the popular anti-frame mindset is about as coherent as these messages themselves. Frames are often abused, but not intrinsically wrong.



  • Not wrong, but they do cause some major accessibility headaches in many cases (this company does work with government bodies from time to time). And to add a bit of fuel to the fire, this guy also suggested that rather than implementing a cms or manually updating pages for clients, that they should just create their updated pages in word and export to html, using an ftp program to upload the pages themselves.



  •  

    It's also possible that he's having some fun with her.



  • @PerdidoPunk said:

    @djork said:

    Is this Gary a "Gary Smith" or a "Gary Nahasapadeknahadeepnamak?"

     

    what's with all the racial comments on this site lately??

    LOL, haven't you noticed the /b/-tards are paying us a visit?




  • nope, he's not, he doesn't even know what a target attribute is...



  • @Vechni said:

    And what happens to your own personal frames? I just the other day got... a frame was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why?

    Excellently used.  I give you a gold star :)
     



  • @djork said:

    @PerdidoPunk said:
    @djork said:

    Is this Gary a "Gary Smith" or a "Gary Nahasapadeknahadeepnamak?"

     

    what's with all the racial comments on this site lately??

    Well there are two explanations for Gary's writing: He's insane and English is not his first language, or he's insane and a complete moron. I'm just trying to give him the benefit of the doubt.

    That's exactly what I was thinking. It seems like he's using certain words, like "security" completely incoherently. Generally, I attribute that to language problems, but apparently in this case he's just an idiot. :)



  • This is one of the best side bar WTFs in ages.  thank you sir for sharing.



  • @blindsleeper said:

    djork, I can 100% assure you that gary is an 50ish white guy who grew up in the midwest, speaking english as his first language, who up until recently was a professor (if you can call him that) for bryant college.

    Then I conclude that no language is his first language.



  • frames are great !!!! their a poor man's AJAX!

     

    </sarcasm>



  • @asuffield said:

    Frames are often abused, but not intrinsically wrong.

    People have offered the same defense for ColdFusion, animated GIFs, and the color hot pink.  And now we have MySpace.

     



  • There's always something worse. 

    @bstorer said:

    @asuffield said:
    Frames are often abused, but not intrinsically wrong.

    People have offered the same defense for ColdFusion

    Frontpage.

    animated GIFs

    Macromedia Flash

    and the color hot pink.

    Chartreuse.

     

      And now we have MySpace.

     

    I shudder to think of greater suckiness... but it will come. 



  • @operagost said:

    There's always something worse. 

    @bstorer said:

    @asuffield said:
    Frames are often abused, but not intrinsically wrong.

    People have offered the same defense for ColdFusion

    Frontpage.

    animated GIFs

    Macromedia Flash

    and the color hot pink.

    Chartreuse.

    And now we have MySpace.

    I shudder to think of greater suckiness... but it will come.

    This is a fun game!

    JSP/Shockwave/Safety orange

     



  • @bstorer said:

    @asuffield said:
    Frames are often abused, but not intrinsically wrong.

    People have offered the same defense for ColdFusion, animated GIFs, and the color hot pink.  And now we have MySpace.

    Hot Pink is not a color.

    It is an EXPERIENCE.
     



  • @bstorer said:

    @asuffield said:
    Frames are often abused, but not intrinsically wrong.

    People have offered the same defense for ColdFusion, animated GIFs, and the color hot pink.  And now we have MySpace.

    Animated GIFs and hot pink can both be put to good use, it's just that most people abuse them. For something to be intrinsically wrong, it must be impossible to use them right. I don't think anybody would dispute that frames are really hard to use well.

    Coldfusion and myspace, I'm not so sure about.



  • Ok, really, frames are the best way to have a menu for something like a control panel.  I swear W3C gets upset when things are too easy for web designers.

    And I'd be interested in seeing the WTFs in some of these screen readers, since they're apparently so horrible that we have to constantly work around them.



  • @asuffield said:

    @bstorer said:
    People have offered the same defense for ColdFusion, animated GIFs, and the color hot pink.  And now we have MySpace.

    Animated GIFs and hot pink can both be put to good use, it's just that most people abuse them. For something to be intrinsically wrong, it must be impossible to use them right. I don't think anybody would dispute that frames are really hard to use well.

    @Cap'n Steve said:

    Ok, really, frames are the best way to
    have a menu for something like a control panel. I swear W3C gets upset
    when things are too easy for web designers.

    That's  somewhat debatable. CSS offers enough capability, but It's IE6 and 7 that don't always play well with positioning.

    But when you use frames, go with the iFrame, I say. At least you have a proper parent-child relationship with the page files, instead of a pointless, empty frameset page.

    Frames are very useful in web applications. Web apps are not the same as web pages, after all.



  • @dhromed said:

    @Cap'n Steve said:

    Ok, really, frames are the best way to have a menu for something like a control panel. I swear W3C gets upset when things are too easy for web designers.

    That's  somewhat debatable. CSS offers enough capability, but It's IE6 and 7 that don't always play well with positioning.



    CSS allows you to do the same layout, but not the embedding (unless I'm missing something).  I don't want to have to rebuild the menu on every page load.



  • @Cap'n Steve said:

    @dhromed said:

    @Cap'n Steve said:

    Ok, really, frames are the best way to have a menu for something like a control panel. I swear W3C gets upset when things are too easy for web designers.

    That's somewhat debatable. CSS offers enough capability, but It's IE6 and 7 that don't always play well with positioning.



    CSS allows you to do the same layout, but not the embedding (unless I'm missing something). I don't want to have to rebuild the menu on every page load.

    I agree with you.

    This is why I advocate the use of iFrames for web apps -- where necessary.



  • @blindsleeper said:

    Here is what I mean: if your server is down, and you have a full page,
    then that full page is not sent and you get the 404 error message. 
    With frames, you can get that error on just a frame.

    Of course, any comprehensive webbing must support multiple 404s in the same browser window when all frames are served from the same broken host.



  • Now my job is creating websites and web applications, and anyone who says frames or iframes make your life easier hasn't left the 90ties yet.

    People want a web application to feel like a real application, instant changes, drag&drop, interactive information*
    Frames in combination with the above will end in a continuous refresh race to keep all the frames up to date, while you could have this "feature" for free by not using frames. By using frames the complexity of the application will grow, since you will have to think about the state information all the frames have, instead of keeping that sort of logic all server side.

    Now to get the funky effects like drag and drop you can easily employ various javascript libraries that will make that easy, the good ones will even make it easy to implement ajax callback so you can make it update the state information on the fly. Which of course will mean you again need to keep track of state changes client side, but this time you can actually do it on a per element basis instead of having to refresh your "menu frame", "shopping basket frame", "whatever frame".

    And don't even start talking about scalability or traffic or whatever, because when your framed application grows you will either have to redesign the distribution of frames or tolerate that your menu frame, basket frame, whatever frame has to refresh even more. While with a frameless JS/ajax based solution you could opt to implement a self building menu where you only call a JSON representation of the menu structure, thus eliminating the need to transfer all the HTML stuff, heck you could even opt to only update those parts of the menu that actually needed to change. Although one could say that it's basically a trade off between bandwidth and processing power, both client side as server side. Since ajax heavy sites hit your webserver like a mofo when it's busy, but hey if you didn't do any stupid stuff that only means your successful and thus can afford to throw hardware against the problem.

    I'm also afraid to say that this isn't sarcasm, yes js/ajax/json are hyped, but there are good solid reasons for using them, instead of "proven" technologies like utilising frames. And having to throw hardware at a problem because your too successful isn't necessarily a bad design, it could be a good beginning.

     

    * sorting of data rows, highlighting selected items, showing information bubbles on hover, etc.. 



  • @stratos said:

    Now my job is creating websites and web applications, and anyone who says frames or iframes make your life easier hasn't left the 90ties yet.

    People want a web application to feel like a real application, instant changes, drag&drop, interactive information*

    Sometimes people want that and it's amazing what can already be done with JS and stuff.

    On the other hand, it's disgusting when websites don't look any better than anything from the 90s, but still don't work on non-mainstream or older browsers - like the IE on a Pocket PC - because they use the new stuff in a way not compatible with anything but mainstream browsers.



  •  

    "Dad told me you make up big words all the time.  Is that true?"

    "Well, to someone with a minisculous vocabulate, it would appear that way, I suppose."

     



  • If you have to keep track of every frame's state, then that's probably a good indication that frames aren't best for your task.  A frame should be a separate page that keeps track of itself.  I'd say that most of the time, Javascript should not interact with other frames.



  • But why mess with all that hand-rolled JS and JSON?  Why not go with a server-side control suite like ComponentArt?  It streams most of the JS/Ajax for you. All cross-browser capable.  For $1,000.  Hell, I burn through that in a week coding all my alerts becuase I don't have a debugger.

    I just don't understand this masocistic love of client-side coding. 



  • @TunnelRat said:

    I just don't understand this masocistic love of client-side coding. 

    It's called "the interface".
     



  • Totally awesome!!

    I found my new Slashdot sig, I believe... maybe even an all-encompassing sig for all websites that I frequent:

    Secure multi-mediation is the future of all webbing.


    Gary rocks! ROFLMAO! 



  • Frames are, indeed, the future.  How else could I be navigating ESPN, MySpace, Facebook, TheDailyWTF, NerdLives, Google, Yahoo, Youtube, and Wikipedia simultaneously?

    Ever been to a sports bar with NFL-Ticket on Sunday, when they have 8 different football games on different TVs all stacked up against a wall?  Yeah, that's my homepage.

    Seriously, though, frames do have their uses (iFrames, like previously mentioned).  RTEs, Google Ads, etc.  Their uses just don't have anything to do with what this guy says they're good for.


     



  • @emurphy said:

     

    "Dad told me you make up big words all the time.  Is that true?"

    "Well, to someone with a minisculous vocabulate, it would appear that way, I suppose."

     

    Kinda funny, but that guy doesn't seem to know much about copyright law (see 2/2/01). 



  • I hate to say it, but if you look closer, Gary makes sense (even though his solution is not the best one).

    I worked at a place whose idea of CMS was to pass around Word forms via e-mail, which finally make it to the "developers" who use DW templates to import the Word form fields. Supposing I update template, then I must update the Word form. Now how do you think I got everyone in the company to use it instead of the previous copy they already had? Right. To make matters worse, different sections of the website had different DW templates so as to change themes, but top nav and bottom nav items were supposed to be the same sitewide, I've got to keep track of a dozen templates each with a dozen more Word forms. (SSI, scripting, or frameset would have been preferred IMO, but they refused to allow SSI and would only tolerate Perl which I'm not going to waste my time with). If you haven't been in such a frustrating position, no wonder few of you get what Gary  means.

    Gary seems to be saying she's got the wrong template for this task. Instead the non-editable regions of the template should be separated via frameset (top or left for nav, bottom or right for content). Then, treat each Word file as a single page which, once converted to HTML, goes directly into the content frame - no import necessary, except maybe into very simple templates that only set the style sheet and stuff. His ranting gets in the way of conveying that, though. He encourages her to "sub-page". That, in itself, is no more ridiculous than using CSS to replace IFRAME, which people do, or using CSS to water-mark navigation items, which people do, or using Flash for scrollable displays, which although reprehensible, people do. How is frameset a worse idea than all that crap? It's the only one that follows a strictly supported standard...

     When he says "my pages, or anybody else's pages will interfere with your code" I bet he means that she's obstructing developer collaboration at that particular company: If a user opens her non-frame page into the content frame, and she links to one of the other developer's framed pages 1) if in a new window, it will be missing its parent frameset, and 2) if in the content frame, they get redundant framesets. With JavaScript disabled, that could easily happen.

    There is really no WTF here except Gary seems to have skipped every English class since Freshman high school. He's not talking about doing something stupid; who of you have not gone to great lengths to isolate (visually and logically) content from one source from content from a different source on the same page? You guys just don't think frameset is the right way to do it. Run into a problem like what I had with my company and then tell me.



  • @xyourfacekillerx said:


    xyourfacekillerx



    Joined on 01-09-2008

    Posts 1

    What's with all the bumping of old threads on this site lately?

    (On the other hand at least I know where djork's sig comes from now. So, thanks?)



  • @magetoo said:

    @xyourfacekillerx said:


    xyourfacekillerx



    Joined on 01-09-2008

    Posts 1

    What's with all the bumping of old threads on this site lately?

    (On the other hand at least I know where djork's sig comes from now. So, thanks?)

    Have you not seen the 'Best of the sidebar' category on the front page?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @magetoo said:

    What's with all the bumping of old threads on this site lately?

    In this particular case, the OP made it to the front page. http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/I-am-right-and-the-entire-Industry-is-wrong.aspx



  • Duh, *slap*.

    I assumed all posts for today were already in and went straight to the forum. Never even occured to check the front page...


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