Iframes good or bad?

Associate
Joined
20 Jul 2004
Posts
88
Location
SUffolk UK
I am in the process of developing a site, I am considering using iframes on the site is this a bad idea and if I do use them what will be the effect on the site?

Cheers

MattB
 
Soldato
Joined
28 Jan 2005
Posts
3,732
Location
Worcester
Well I know that the iframe tag has been dropped from XHTML strict so if you want to use it then you'd have to use a transitional doctype.

Search engines don't particulaly like frames/iframes and there are other and much better ways of displaying content than these.

How were you thinking of using the frames?
 
Associate
OP
Joined
20 Jul 2004
Posts
88
Location
SUffolk UK
Mr_L said:
Well I know that the iframe tag has been dropped from XHTML strict so if you want to use it then you'd have to use a transitional doctype.

Search engines don't particulaly like frames/iframes and there are other and much better ways of displaying content than these.

How were you thinking of using the frames?


I was thinking of using iframe in some sort image gallery.
 
Soldato
Joined
20 Oct 2002
Posts
17,854
Location
London
Depending on what you need it for, why not just use a div with a set height and width. Set overflow: auto in its CSS and jobs a good'un. The div will scroll when it needs to.
 
Soldato
Joined
26 Dec 2003
Posts
16,522
Location
London
Search engines, text based browsers and screen readers might have problems indexing your content, and it'll be difficult to bookmark and navigate for you readers - bookmarking will just take them to the start page (or the content of the frame, in which case it will be without navigation or anything else) and opening a link in a new window/tab will mean losing navigation as well.
 
Associate
Joined
26 Jul 2004
Posts
1,074
Location
Birmingham
robmiller said:
Search engines, text based browsers and screen readers might have problems indexing your content, and it'll be difficult to bookmark and navigate for you readers - bookmarking will just take them to the start page (or the content of the frame, in which case it will be without navigation or anything else) and opening a link in a new window/tab will mean losing navigation as well.

Sounds like you're talking about frames not iframes :o
 
Associate
OP
Joined
20 Jul 2004
Posts
88
Location
SUffolk UK
Cheers for the help guys, the reason I need to use iframe was because I wanted to have a thumbnail gallery which when the thumbnail is clicked on displays a larger version of the picture on the page without having to reload the whole page again.
What could be an alternative to using iframe to do this?
 
Soldato
Joined
26 Dec 2003
Posts
16,522
Location
London
MattB said:
Cheers for the help guys, the reason I need to use iframe was because I wanted to have a thumbnail gallery which when the thumbnail is clicked on displays a larger version of the picture on the page without having to reload the whole page again.
What could be an alternative to using iframe to do this?

You could use Javascript, with an HTML fall-back in case the user doesn't have it enabled :)
 
Associate
OP
Joined
20 Jul 2004
Posts
88
Location
SUffolk UK
robmiller said:
You could use Javascript, with an HTML fall-back in case the user doesn't have it enabled :)
That sounds like it would be just what I need, any idea where I could find an example of this?

Cheers

MattB
 
Associate
Joined
22 Dec 2005
Posts
138
I've been using Iframes for a few years, they are simple to set up and you get a lot of control on your layout design.

Shame to hear WC3 XHTML are dropping it, I hope future IE releases will still support Iframes. My site uses them, I also use them for a gallery in my 3d and vr games section www.richard1973.co.uk (though site is down today, well it was earlier :( )
 
Associate
Joined
22 Dec 2005
Posts
138
just like to add i've no problems with google finding my site which has Iframes used, it appears on first page UK and worldwide just by searching my name richard brown. I'm aware normal frames can cause problems though, but not sure to what degree of a problem.
 
Permabanned
Joined
21 Apr 2004
Posts
13,312
Location
Wolverhampton
richard1973 said:
I've been using Iframes for a few years, they are simple to set up and you get a lot of control on your layout design.

Shame to hear WC3 XHTML are dropping it, I hope future IE releases will still support Iframes. My site uses them, I also use them for a gallery in my 3d and vr games section www.richard1973.co.uk (though site is down today, well it was earlier :( )

They will still support iframes, but the simple fact is that iframes are oldhat.

Far more effective ways of controlling your layouts.

and even though Google will index iframed sites, Google will always index properly designed sites better (XHTML + CSS).
 
Back
Top Bottom