Dreamweaver Tutorials Framesets

Frames provide a way to divide a browser window into multiple sections, each of the sections can display a different file. Most common you may have a frameset with a left frame holding your navigation page, while the main part holds the content, see fig. 1001

Frames can get complex, and indeed can also be used for passing information in pages that are hidden from the viewer, there are much better ways to do this using scripting like JavaScript, PHP or ASP. Dreamweaver does make using frames a lot easier, but always ask if you really need to use them.

A frame is a region in the browser that can display a document independent of what’s being displayed in the rest of the window.

A frameset is just a HTML file that defines the layout and properties of a set of frames, including the number of frames, the size of the frames, and the path of the page to be displayed in each of the named frames.

To view a frameset in a browser, enter the name frameset ; the browser then opens the relevant documents to display in the frames. The frameset file for a site is often named index.htm, so that it displays by default if a visitor doesn’t specify a filename. JavaScript can also be used to stop pages being loaded without the parent frames, this is covered in detail in the Dreamweaver Scripting tutorials on training CD 6.

So to make in clear, a frame just calls a page and displays it, you can load any page into a frame, even a page from a different web site, note that cookies from a different domain will not work.

To create a Frameset in Dreamweaver MX2004 do the following

To create a frameset with the current document displayed in one of the frames, use the Insert bar’s Frames category the colored box will be the part of the frame that the active document will be placed into.

You can format all of your frames and framesets with the Property inspector. You can set scrolling on or off, set width and height, name each frame, and more. For more information watch the Dreamweaver Tutorials on Advanced page layout

A site that appears in the browser as a single page comprising of 3 frames actually consists of at least 4 separate pages: the frameset file, plus the three pages containing the content . When you design a page using framesets in Dreamweaver, you must save each of these four files in order for the page to work properly in the browser.