[whatwg] framesets

Boris Zbarsky bzbarsky at MIT.EDU
Fri Oct 9 12:13:21 PDT 2009


On 10/9/09 2:55 PM, Peter Brawley wrote:
> Framesets are part of the current HTML standard and should remain.

This isn't really a convincing argument.  There are various other things 
that are part of HTML 4.01 that are worth removing and have been removed.

That said, I'm not sure why there's a worry about what's in the standard 
given the http://www.artfulsoftware.com/infotree/mysqlquerytree.php 
example (which doesn't actually validate per the HTML 4.01 standard, 
since it's missing a doctype).

On a general note, though, the reasoning behind removing framesets seems 
to be that they make it very easy to address specific authoring use 
cases that the W3C wants to discourage, right?  The use cases can still 
be addressed with <iframe> and a bit of pain if resizing is desired, as 
far as I can tell.  So this is all about assuming that the bit of pain 
will be enough of an inconvenience for authors that they will either 
address the use case in some way not involving iframes at all (and which 
presumably has a lower pain threshild; what is this way?) or not address 
the use case at all (unlikely, since they're being paid to address it). 
  Since UAs must continue supporting framesets anyway, the reasoning 
behind removing them seems somewhat weak to me.

-Boris



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