Frames

• _top
• _self
• _blank
• _parent

The W3C, the ruling authority on HTML and Internet languages states the meaning of these rather vague target anchors like this:

• _blank    The user agent should load the designated document in a new, unnamed window.
• _self       The user agent should load the document in the same frame as the element that refers to this target.
• _parent  The user agent should load the document into the immediate FRAMESET parent of the current frame. This value is equivalent to _self if the current frame has no parent.
• _top       The user agent should load the document into the full, original window (thus cancelling all other frames). This value is equivalent to _self if the current frame has no parent.

Basically what that all means is that "_blank" will open the link in a new window. Good if you're linking to a foreign file, as the surfer can still look around your site. "_self" will open the link in the same frame as the document which contains the link, used normally for linking to files from the main information window. "_parent" will cancel the current frameset and open the file there. This looks like this for our last example:

Will then look like this, after clicking on a _parent link in mainFrame.

"_top" should cancel all frames and show the document without any frame support whatsoever. This is also quite good for links to foreign pages, as they are then not "trapped" in your frames anymore. Similarly, you can offer a link on your page to kill frames, if someone links to your site, without thinking that your page is inside their frame. You just link to your start page with the taregt attribute set to "_top". This reloads your page without foriegn surrounding frames. But, then we all now know how not to trap someone elses page inside our own frames, so this problem should not arise!

You can also specify a frame name as a target; this is especially important when linking froma content window to an information window. However, the W3C thought of everybody who has to type HTML files by hand and designed a nice little tag called:

<base target="xyz">

This tag is inserted in the head of a HTML document and offers you the possibility of saying, "Everything I click on here shall be shown over there!" instead of xyz, you insert the name of the frame you want everything to be shown in. Simple. If you want a link to go somewhere else, however, you can still use target inside the <a> tag.

Further attributes:

You can configure your frameset just as easily as configuring a table, with the only difference that frames have a few more arguments than do tables:

• resizeable: can be either yes or no. (Syntax resizeable="yes/no" This syntax is valid for all following attributes).
• srollbars: yes/no/auto. This determines whether scrollbars will be shown in your frames or not. yes for always, no for never and auto, well, for automaticscrollbars , depending on resolution.
• border: 0 or other number
• marginheight: a number in pixels that determines the top or bottom buffer between the frame border and the text shown within it.
• marginwidth: determines the space on either side of a vertical border. These two are not normally need, but you can use them for inserting graphix into a small corner frame without any background showing, for instance, by setting the frames to be exactly the size of the image and setting the margins to zero.

These can be used either in the <frameset> as global values or in the <frame> as local variables.

But, as for everything in HTML, if you see something that looks good, then check out the source code, and try it out for yourself. Just keep experimenting - it's how the internet developed after all! :-)

If you have any questions to these pages, you can contact me here:

csac1521@uibk.ac.at

Back to the Index.