[whatwg] framesets

[Peter Brawley]

According to http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-html5-diff-20090825/, "The 
following elements are not in HTML 5 because their usage affected 
usability and accessibility for the end user in a negative way:
    * frame
    * frameset
    * noframes"

As Andrew Fedoniouk said on this list in 2007 
(http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2007-March/010186.html), 
"There are use cases when frames are good. As an example: online (and 
offline) help systems ...  In such cases they provide level of usability 
higher than any other method of presenting content of such type."

I agree wholeheartedly, esp. when the topic list is long (thousands or 
millions of items) and itself editable, and the required interface is 
for flexible, independent scrolling of freely choosable bits of the 
topic tree in the left frame without affecting anything in the right 
detail frame. As Andrew said, frames are the only good way to do this.

New standards ought not to remove required functionalities, ought not to 
break perfectly good & legal working code, and ought not to impose 
Hobson's choice of keeping functionality vs remaining 
standards-compliant. How do we get the unwise decision to remove 
framesets revisited?

Peter Brawley
http://www.artfulsoftware.com