Life without Frames

I have a pet peeve.
I dislike Frames in HTML.

They have never done anything personal to me, but I dislike them nonetheless. Maybe it’s the way they interact with each other while ignoring my requests. Maybe it’s because I can do everything without them, so I harbor contempt for their very presence. Or maybe the way they mimic real applications without any of the real powers. Nobody likes posers.

None of this is relevant since I have to work with frames for my deliverables anyways. We built our electronic documentation to use Frames so I have to get over myself and deal with it.

The issue is not that the job isn’t done, it’s just that if we’re going to be working with design, then our presentations should show that. I have dreams of a CSS-only data browser. Gone will be my whining of lost navigation & wasted white space!

Here is my current pain (with incriminating evidence blanked out).


The lost navigation on the left side is just plain rude. The user has to scroll to see everything. We do not have so many data groupings that we have to force our clients to do something so base as scrolling! Save that for the huge layouts and other “have to”s.

Worse then rude comes wasteful. With tons of white space, why force scrolling? Why chop up important text when we have plenty of room? Give it all to the client at once.

And here is my new design.


By adding in scrolling only when necessary we keep the user in focus. The navigation is the whole purpose so it is repeated twice on the home page. One spot is used to introduce the concepts; the other time is to familiarize the navigation view. White space is used to show grouping and hides lack of content better. Together they bring a sense of professionalism to the data browser and an over all impression of tidiness.

An idea I’m not showing is making the images more sizable than current, “logo” like. Then if more Data Types are added the layout can resize itself accordingly.

My new layout has the same behavior and same data as before. Yet, being entirely CSS based, it is more usable and much better looking.