Frames are wildly reviled in the modern (post 1999 or so) Web, largely on usability and linkability grounds. Any content in a frameset (barring server-side or JavaScript tricks) cannot be directly linked to – there is only one URL possible: that of the frameset itself. There are ways to force a navigation element to always display within the window (one of the many reasons people like frames) or to inject someone else’s content into your page (another) that don’t result in breaking the Web.
What is your use-case here? We can suggest something more up-to-date.
Walter
On Oct 9, 2012, at 9:05 AM, James I wrote:
Hi.
I noticed a few familiar names on this thread, Hi again Walter.
Thanks Walt, I guess my biggest concern is the size of my pages.
They are averaging 240,000 (is it shown in K?)
No, bytes. Divide by 1,024 to get K. Frames wouldn’t help you with file size, though.
and I’m worried that that’s too big. My 17m connection doesn’t seem to struggle though.
I could reduce the quality of some of the pics but wondered instead if frames might help.
I think I may have to rely on Cashing instead.
Concentrate on moving as many images as possible to the Master Page (where they will be exactly alike from page to page) as that will get you the largest gains in browser cacheing. (Only files that are exactly alike will be satisfied from the browser’s cache.) Your host already runs Apache (well, most do) and that provides runtime compression of assets, so the actual bandwidth needed to send files from the server to the browser is dramatically smaller than the file sizes reported by Freeway. But the thing to remember here is that even if the data is heavily compressed before being squirted over the wire, it still has to be decompressed and held in memory on the browser’s end before it can be displayed. This is particularly important when you get to full-page image backgrounds – even tiling backgrounds. The browser has to compose the entire bitmap in memory, which is often many megabytes total size, even if you took a page from DeltaDave’s book and compressed the thing into oblivion.