Editing Frame (World Wide Web) (section)

==Criticism==

The practice of framing HTML content led to numerous criticisms, most centering on [[usability]] and [[accessibility]] concerns. These include:

* Framing breaks the identity between the content and [[URL]] as displayed in the browser, making it difficult to link to or bookmark a particular item of content within the frameset<ref name="Nielsen1996">{{cite web |url= http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9612.html |title=Frames Suck Most of the Time |first=Jakob |last=Nielsen |date=December 1996}}</ref>
* The implementation of frames is inconsistent across different browsers<ref name="Nielsen1996" />
*Browsers which render material linearly do not handle frames well.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/frames/frames_famsupp_15.html |title=Should You Use Frames? |publisher=HTML Code Tutorial |access-date=7 April 2010 |archive-date=6 August 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160806170805/http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/frames/frames_famsupp_15.html |url-status=dead }}</ref>
**[[Screen reader]] programs
**text or audio browsers
**[[Email]] browsers such as [[Agora (web browser)|Agora]]<ref name="geboyd">{{cite web|title=G.E.Boyd's How To Do Just About Anything by email – Part 1|url=http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/1236/howto1.html|publisher=[[GeoCities]]|access-date=24 June 2010|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20000817030717/http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/1236/howto1.html|archive-date=17 August 2000|date=11 August 2000}}</ref>
**[[Mobile browser]]s
* Framing complicates [[web indexing]] and can be detrimental to [[search engine optimization]].<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.lewesseo.com/seo-fundamentals-1/|title=SEO fundamentals 1|last=Moore-Eded|first=Piers|publisher=Lewes SEO|access-date=25 February 2012}}</ref>
* Framing confuses the boundaries between content on different servers,<ref>{{cite web |url= http://budugllydesign.com/frame9806/frames9.htm |archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20020328142514/http://budugllydesign.com/frame9806/frames9.htm |url-status= usurped |archive-date= 28 March 2002 |title=I Hate Frames Club}}</ref> which raises issues of copyright infringement<ref name="htmlfaq">{{cite web |url=http://www.html-faq.com/htmlframes/?framesareevil |title=Why are frames so evil?}}</ref>
* Visitors arriving from search engines may land on a page intended for display in a frame, resulting in the visitor having no way to navigate to the rest of the site<ref name="prosandcons">{{cite web |title=The Pros and Cons of Frames in Web Pages |url=http://www.mediacollege.com/internet/html/frames/pros-cons.html}}</ref>
* Frames change the behavior of the back button.<ref name="prosandcons" />
* Users usually do not expect browsers to print frames the way they do.<ref name="htmlfaq" />
* External links on web pages which use frames may cause other pages to appear in the frameset, since the default behaviour for a link is to load in the current frame if the author does not specify otherwise. This could be used by unscrupulous webmasters to make it appear as though content from another site was actually part of the site hosting 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.<br>This behaviour could be mitigated by:
**disabling scrolling for smaller frames that typically did not require a scrollbar;
**using fluid design characteristics in target pages instead of fixed designs, so that the content would not cause horizontal scrollbars in the first place.