Frameset Demonstration

Frame Problems: Frames are useful, but..

You can't bookmark a particular frameset, only the default one.
Search engine robots index the individual pages, which were designed to be part of a frameset. It's difficult to link from the individual pages back to the correct frameset; often, the default frameset does not contain the desired page and the user has to follow several links to return to the desired point.

This note demonstrates a technique for navigating frames using a CGI script to generate the frameset. Given a template frameset and required frame names as a query string in the URL, this script replaces tokens in the template with page names, calculates content length and modification time, processes If-Modified-Since requests, adds a BASE tag, and serves the frameset.

Each possible set of frames within the frameset has (the possibility of) a unique URL, which may be bookmarked. Each individual frame page can have a link to the correct parent frameset.

The individual pages use a REV=META LINK, proposed in draft-daviel-metadata-link-00.txt, which would cause robots to index the page under the parent frameset.

Framesets

The Original Version (no CGI)

CGI/JavaScript Versions

You can bookmark these, or "Go" to them.

Individual Pages

You can select the reFrame link at the bottom of each page to restore the frames - or, the JavaScript code should do it automatically. Currently Back won't work; use the Go menu to skip back to the original referrer.