Controversial Web "Framing" Makes a Comeback

theodp writes "The WSJ reports that the controversial practice of framing seems to be making a comeback on the Web. Big sites like Digg, Facebook, Ask.com and StumbleUpon have all begun framing links recently, joining the likes of Google, which employs the technique for Image Search. Long ago, Jakob Nielsen argued that 'frames break the fundamental user model of the web page,' but, today's practitioners contend, 'it's a feature, not a bug,' and say it provides publishers with massive distribution they wouldn't otherwise have."

Comments

Re:Feature?

[digitalchinky]

The main reasons: Ad Revenue. Search Engine Optimisation. And, as you say, annoying website builders. The average site visitor doesn't much care either way.

Maybe it was bad back in 1996

[SashaMan]

Jakob Nielsen argued that frames "broke the fundamental user model of the web page" ... back in 1996. Sorry, the user model of the web has fundamentally changed since then.

For example, in the google image case, I really like the frame because it serves an important purpose. Often times it takes much longer to load the target page than the top frame. If that loading takes too long, I can just click the "See full size image" to go directly to the image without having to load the whole page.

In any case, I always was amazed how Nielsen was heralded as this guru of web usability. He may have been early to the game, but I always thought most of his recommendations were bad. Just take a look at his website, http://www.useit.com./ Besides being god-awfully ugly, the lack of any real borders or section boundaries makes it really hard to find information quickly.

Re:Maybe it was bad back in 1996

[tenco]

In any case, I always was amazed how Nielsen was heralded as this guru of web usability. He may have been early to the game, but I always thought most of his recommendations were bad. Just take a look at his website, http://www.useit.com./ Besides being god-awfully ugly, the lack of any real borders or section boundaries makes it really hard to find information quickly.

Seriously? I hadn't any trouble navigating that page. News is nicely separated from permanent content without using a menu. IMHO menus on webpages severely impact their usability in a bad way. Websites with menus on it are usually the ones where I get lost easily and don't find what I'm looking for. In most cases the search function is broken, too.

And about the page being ugly: it may be styled minimalistic, but that's exactly the way I like it. I don't like sites with much bling-bling like http://www.space.com/ and especially game/movie sites because it distracts me from the actual content. But as both seem to correlate reciprocally, that's not a big problem to me...

Re:The i's have it

[drinkypoo]

I assume we are talking about i-frames here, not setting out an entire page using the old-fashioned Frameset method.

You're wrong, though. They're talking about loading a frameset with a top page provided by them and the bottom page provided by someone else, just like google does with cached pages except for more or less all external links posted by users.

An IFRAME would be even more offensive, for reasons which should be obvious.

Re:How to stop it

[Sephr]

Wow, good idea! Let's just introduce two more global variables in some messy code! actually, how about we don't and we use something anonymous like this (also don't use as they fuck up E4X:

<script type="text/javascript">
if (top.location != location) {
top.location = location;
}
</script>