HTML The Definitive Guide (121 page)

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Authors: Chuck Musciano Bill Kennedy

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Frames are enabled with a special frame document. Its contents do not get displayed. Rather, the frame document contains extension HTML tags that tell the browser how to divide its main display window into discrete frames, and what documents go inside the frames.

The individual documents referenced and displayed in the frame document window act independently, to a degree; the frame document controls the entire window. You can, however, direct one frame's document to load new content into another frame. That's done by attaching a name to a frame and targeting the named frame with a special attribute for the hyperlink tag.

11.4 Beyond Ordinary Tables

12.2 Frame Tags

12.2 Frame Tags

You need to know only three HTML tags to create a frame document: , , and

Notice a few things in the simple frame example and its rendered image (Figure 12.1
). First, the order in which the browser fills the frames in a frameset goes across each row. Second, frame 4 sports a scrollbar because we told it to, even though the contents may otherwise fit without scrolling.

(Scrollbars automatically appear if the contents overflow the frame's dimensions, unless explicitly

disabled with the scrolling attribute in the tag.)
[, 12.4]

Another item of interest is the name attribute in one of the frame tags. Once named, you can reference a particular frame as the location in which to display a hypertext-linked document. To do that, you add a special target attribute to the anchor () tag of the source hypertext link. For instance, to link a document called new.html for display in frame 3, which we've named "fill_me", the anchor looks like this:

If the user chooses the link, say in frame 1, the
new.html
document will replace the original
frame3.html
contents in frame 3. [The target Attribute for the Tag, 12.7.1]

Finally, although Netscape and Internet Explorer both support frames, it is possible that some other browser users will try and view your frame documents. That's why each of your key frame documents should provide a back door to your HTML document collection with the