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0 pointskbolino9mo ago0 comments

I feel like we're mostly in violent agreement.

The key point about frames in the original context of this thread as I understood it was that they allowed a site to only load the content that actually changes. So accounting for the table-layout era doesn't really change my perspective: frames were so bad, that web sites were willing to regress to full-page-loads instead, at least until AJAX came along -- though that also coincides with the rise of the (still ongoing) div-layout era.

I agree wholeheartedly that the concept of partial page reloading in a rectilinear grid is alive and well. Doing that with JavaScript and CSS is the whole premise of an SPA as I understand it, and those details are key to the difference between now and the heyday of frames. But there was also a time when full-page-loading was the norm between the two eras, reflecting the disillusionment with frames as they were implemented and ossified.

The W3C (*) spent a good few years working on multiple things most of which didn't pan out. Maybe I'm being too harsh, but it feels like a lot of their working groups just went off and disconnected from practice and industry for far too long. Maybe that was tangential to the ~decade-long stagnation of web standards, but that doesn't really change the point of my criticism.

* = Ecma has a part in this too, since JavaScript was standardized by them instead of W3C for whatever reason, and they also went off into la-la land for roughly the same period of time

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alganet9mo ago

> I feel like we're mostly in violent agreement.

Probably, yes!

> So accounting for the table-layout era doesn't really change my perspective: frames were so bad, that web sites were willing to regress to full-page-loads instead

That's where we disagree.

From my point of view, what brought sites to full page loads were designers. Design folk wanted to break out of the "left side navigation, right content" mold and make good looking visual experiences.

This all started with sites like this:

https://www.spacejam.com/1996/

This website is a interstitial fossil between frames and full table nightmare. The homepage represents what (at the time) was a radical way of experiencing the web.

It still carries vestiges of frames in other sections:

https://www.spacejam.com/1996/cmp/jamcentral/jamcentralframe...

However, the home is their crown jewel and it is representative of the years that followed.

This new visual experience was enough to discard partial loading. And for a while, it stayed like this.

JS up to this point was still a toy. DHTML, hover tricks, trinkets following the mouse cursor. It was unthinkable to use it to manage content.

It was not until CSS zen garden, in 2003, that things started to shift:

https://csszengarden.com/pages/about/

Now, some people were saying that you could do pretty websites without tables. By this time, frames were already forgotten and obsolete.

So, JS never killed frames. There was a whole generation in between that never used frames, but also never used JS to manage content (no AJAX, no innerHTML shinenigans, nothing).

Today, websites look more like the POSIX spec (in structure and how content is loaded) than the SpaceJam website that defined a generation. The frames idea is kind of back in town. It doesn't matter that we don't use the same 90s tech, they were right about content over style, right about partial loading, right about a lot of structural things.

kbolinoOP9mo ago

I appreciate looking at things from a different perspective! I can see your line of argument now.

I should clarify. I don't think JS killed frames, that's not what I meant. If anything, I think JS could have saved frames. But the failure of frames left a gap that eventually JS (esp. with AJAX) filled. Lots of other stuff was going on at this time too, including alternative tech like Java, Flash, and ActiveX, all of which were trying to do more by bypassing the "standard" tech stack entirely.

I think the ossification of web standards from ca. 1999 to 2012, combined with the rapidly growing user base, and with web developers/designers aggressively pushing the envelope of what the tech could do, put the standard stuff on the back foot pretty badly. Really, I'm talking about the whole ecosystem and not just the standards bodies themselves; there was an era where e.g. improving HTML itself was just not the active mentality. Both inside and outside of W3C (etc.), it seemed that nobody cared to make the standard stuff better. W3C focused on unproductive tangents; web devs focused on non-standard tech or "not the intended use" (like tables for layout).

So I think we can say that <frameset> frames died a somewhat unfair death, caused partly by their initial shortcomings, partly by people trying to break outside of the (literal) boxes they imposed, and partly by the inability of the standard tech to evolve and address those shortcomings in a timely fashion. But just as there was a reason they failed, there was a reason they existed too.

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