Making a Frames Page

How do you make frames?

Before you make a frames page, be sure that you have a browser that will support frames.

You can make either horizontal or vertical frames pages. Since this is an introductory session, we will limit our instructions to a horizontal-frames page. The steps involved are:

creating the primary frames page
creating the scroll file
creating files to be put into the display portion of the frames page

Creating the primary frames page

First, you need to create the primary frames page. Look at the following coding, remembering that the periods should be left out. The commands are given in the order they would normally appear.

<.html>

opens the html document

<.title>text<./title>

titles the document

<.frameset cols="20%, 80%">

opens the frame function and sets the left frame size to 20% of the screen and the right frame to 80% of the screen

<.frame src="filename.html">

tells the computer to put the file named filename.html into the left frame

<.frame src="filenameb.html" name="display">

tells the computer to put the file named filenameb.html into the right frame and also names the right frame as a location named "display"; the filenames are not significant--the computer knows this is the right frame because it is the second frame src command in the file

<./frameset>

turns off the frame function

<.no frames>

opens a page to be read by those browsers that will not support frames; anything appearing after this command becomes the main page of the site for non-frames browsers, so it should have links to everything the site links to or to the file that is put into the left frame of the frames version of the page

Click on the View button at the top of this browser and select document source: Since this is a frames document, you can see the coding that set up the frames for this site. [top]

Creating the Scroll Page

The scroll page appears in the left frame and usually contains all the links to the documents in the archive for the site. To create the scroll page, open a file, and put in all the normal html coding for a typical document. When you put in the a href commands, however, there is a difference. Instead of only naming the document you want to bring up, you also tell the computer where to put it, namely in the frame named display. Look at the following command, remembering that the periods after the < should be left out:

<.a href="filenamec.html" target="display">hot links words<./a>

Notice that the difference is the target and display command inside the a href command. This addition to the typical reference command tells the computer not to replace the whole web page, but instead to leave the left frame where it is and to replace the right frame with the file named in the reference command. [top]

Creating Files for the Right Frame

The files for the right frame are simple html documents. You need to be careful that their names match the links you created in the scroll page, and you should avoid putting too many links in these pages because links in these pages simply dump new documents into the right frame, and some times you can end up creating a conflict between the purpose of the site and another homepage linked in the right frame. [top]