[Mailman-Developers] RE: Mailman-Developers digest, Vol 1 #328 - 6 msgs

[John Reekie]

> Here are some of possible uses I have been thinking about for HTML
> <frame>s in Mailman:
> 
>  * Implementing a admin-interface sidebar with links to the various
>    admin pages
> 
>  * Viewing list option documentation in the same browser window as the
>    admin interface
> 
>  * Keeping buttons like "submit changes" fixed in one window position
>    while scrolling through all the settings in another frame (although
>    this might very well be undoable due to the SUBMIT input being in
>    another document than where the POST form is...)

Frames are only useful for pages that are authored by hand.
If you are dynamically generating pages, I think it really is
better to stay away from frames. You can do the first two things
in code and it will be easier to deal with and more robust. The
third you can't, but it's also of dubious benefit.

Basically, frames introduce all kinds of navigation problems.
Although in theory they can be made to work properly, they
rarely do. Things like having four scrollbars in one browser
window, having yahoo.com embedded in one of your frames, and
so on, are the kinds of things that you expect from frames-based
sites. There are a few cases where frames are useful (eg Javadoc)
but not many -- and that particular example again is static
HTML.

My 2c :-)

I have some pages that are a dynamically generated mix of
MailMan HTML and my own, and I think they might illustrate how
much you don't need frames :) I'll post a URL once I get a
few more bugs ironed out.

JohnR