[whatwg] framesets

[Aryeh Gregor]

On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 1:47 PM, Peter Brawley <pb at artfulsoftware.com> wrote:
> It suggests no such thing. Your "suggestion", applied to surgery, would be
> that primum non nocere implies surgery should never remove hurt or remove
> useful tissue. The inference is overinclusive, to put it mildly. W3C's job
> is to enable, not function like a commissariat.

The W3C's and WHATWG's jobs are to make standards that promote the
overall health of the web.  This isn't always compatible with allowing
all authors to do everything they want.  To take a more clear-cut
example, a lot of authors would like to be able to stop users from
downloading videos.  <video> deliberately doesn't try to support this
use-case, because it's viewed as harmful.  So those authors will have
to hack up solutions using Flash or JavaScript or whatever, or else
give up and allow it.

Of course, no one actually has to follow the standards.  You can still
use frames.  Your page just won't validate.  If you think the W3C and
WHATWG are commissariats, this shouldn't worry you, since all it says
is your page doesn't follow what the W3C and/or WHATWG say.

> These are not external links. You want these pages to make each item
> externally linkable. The client does not. The client wins this debate hands
> down.

That's not how the W3C or the WHATWG or any standards bodies operate.
If you want a feature in HTML5, you have to argue that it would help
the web to support it, not just that some authors want it.  Your
current arguments are very unlikely to get the spec changed (although
I don't have any say in that).

Users of a site using frames will have a worse experience, because
features like link-sharing and bookmarking won't work.  You've said
that you would *like* these features not to work.  Why, exactly?  This
kind of degradation needs to be justified.

> Already explained. So that a user may enter and exit the frameset as one page

I don't see why that's beneficial.  It conflicts with expected
behavior.  If you follow a link and then click "back", your
link-following should be undone.  You shouldn't be taken to a totally
different page that you left half an hour ago.

On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 2:09 PM, Thomas Broyer <t.broyer at gmail.com> wrote:
> Framesets, iframes, AJAX+innerHTML all allow this; you can't present
> this as an argument for frameset or against their removal

I don't see how iframes would allow you to deliberately mess up
navigation in the same way as frames do.  AJAX would, and does, but
that's a lot harder for authors to implement, so asking for an easier
way seems legitimate.