Ancient Buddhist Texts Home Page

The Problem with Frames

A number of the Html documents have now been provided with hyperlinked indexes. A problem arises with some of these documents because when you access the main text the normal notes pane is not seen at the bottom of the page, and when you click on a hyperlink to a note it opens in a new window, which is somewhat inconvenient.

Because of a deficiency with frames documents the contents of the frames cannot be addressed or accessed by hyperlinks directly, without by-passing the frames document altogether. If I show you what a frames documents looks like the whole problem should become clear (for the sake of clarity the example is more basic than is actually used on this site):

That is the whole document, and as can be seen there is no content, and therefore nothing to address. There is only an instruction as to which documents are to be loaded into the frames. If we want to access the Text document itself, we must call it from outside the frame, by calling "Patimokkha-1-Text.htm" - but then the document loads outside the frame.

Frames themselves are of course a good idea, but the implementation has been misconceived. If the second frame was called from inside the main document at least the main work would have been addressable, and the second frame (or more) available from there. The Html might then have looked something like this:

The notes document would then load in place as the text document was loading, and at least the main document could be addressable. Is it now too late for such a workaround to be implemented? In any case I hope you find that the indexes that have been presented here are still useful and worth the work that has been put into them.

Go back to the index you came from.

Ānandajoti Bhikkhu
January, 2006