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

How to stop it

[Anonymous Coward]

stick this in the head of your page

<script type="text/javascript"><!--
var _tl=top.location,_sl=self.location;if(_tl!=_sl)window.top.location=_sl;
//-->
</script>

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>

Re:How to stop it

[StarsAreAlsoFire]

if (top.location != location) {
        window.location = "http://www.goatse.cx";
}
</script>

Don't just spout phrases for the sake of it

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's a feature, not a bug" would make sense if we were talking about something that actually arose as a bug. People don't think about what they write these days, they just let out torrent upon torrent of brainfarts.

Re:Don't just spout phrases for the sake of it

[Anonymous Coward]

People don't think about what they write these days, they just let out torrent upon torrent of brainfarts.

lol, i know just what you mean people are such morans these days!!! my friend does that all the time but shes a slut she went to see the new Batman movie with me and it was so funny, oh that reminds me no i forgot sorry

Re:Don't just spout phrases for the sake of it

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone who spells moron "moran" should not be criticizing anyone else's intelligence.

Nor should someone who has just been whooshed by low-level parody.

Can I close the frame?

[reboot246]

If the frame has a button or such to close it, I don't have a problem with the frame.

Re:Can I close the frame?

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. As long as I can close it I could care less that it's there.

How much less could you care? This information is the only thing that stands between us and the knowledge of how much you do care!

Re:Can I close the frame?

[RiotingPacifist]

Not that this affects you point, but for sites that don't offer that (I haven't come across any),
In firefox: right click -> this frame -> show only this frame, will sort you out, other browsers probably perform similarly.

Re:Can I close the frame?

[Antique Geekmeister]

That's like saying "in and of itself, using a cell phone or radio while driving is not bad". There are a very few exceptions where it's helpful. Communications for long-haul trucking is very helpful, and for delivery personnel to get directions at the delivery point in slow traffic. But it's so overused and so destructive in its normal use.

I swear I didn't do it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't listen to the web of lies. Whatever it says about me, I didn't do it. I've been framed!

Feature?

[WillKemp]

It's a bug not a feature. It's pointless, stupid and annoying.

Facebook does it (with some links but not others) - and there's just no point to it. The link opens in a new tab and the old tab is still there. It might make sense if you were going to open the link in the same tab, but you're not.

What possible advantage is there in opening a link in a frame in a new tab - apart from annoying users?

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.

Re:Feature?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the web equivalent of crappy programs throwing themselves in your system tray needlessly: gaining mindshare and visibility so they are more attractive to marketers.

Do they need to be there? Of course not. But they want to be, and most users put up with it. The blame lies equally with users who just say, "well, ok, I guess that's fine." They allow it to happen.

Finally the backlash hits

[Night Goat]

I first started seeing this in Facebook. It was getting pretty annoying to have to close out a frame in order to see the web page at the full size of my browser window. Hopefully, these companies that do this realize that it just irritates people and doesn't improve the visitors' experience.

Re:Finally the backlash hits

[cizoozic]

It seems like another case of that annoying "You are now leaving our site. It's a big scary internet world out there where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs! Are you sure you want to do that? We take no responsibility for the rest of the internet, but you seem like the kind of idiot that would sue us for a link one of our users provided. Here, we'll give you a life line back to our site, and since you have 15 toolbars installed, you probably don't have any screen space left to see the other site anyway."

It's good if the frame adds value

[Anonymous Coward]

It all depends on what the outer frame does. If it adds value to the link - e.g. as Google Image search does, which shows you the picture/allows you to magnify it - then I think that framing is a good idea.

If, on the other hand, it is just there to try to 'keep the users on your site', then it is plain annoying. If this comes back, so will the frame breakout scripts.

In any case, a 'close' button should always be provided.

In my opinion, the way Google Images frames external sites is exemplary, and should be the way others do it too.

Re:It's good if the frame adds value

[descil]

It's not advertising revenue I'm concerned with, but all the data I enter on those various sites that they should not be sharing with each other. Or with facebook. Or with Google. I guess at some point you have to give in, but not before making your security a top priority.

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

[interiot]

No, the reason that Google Images uses frames is that the designers were faced with three alternatives:

1. Display only the full-size image. This hotlinking, and is considered worse than framing.
2. Display only to HTML page. At best, it makes the user play hide-and-go-seek. At worst, the image is hidden, and the user has to figure out how to make some random Javascript happy before the image can be displayed. Either way, the user often ends up being very frustrated.
3. Use a frame.

Framing was the best of three bad alternatives.

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:Maybe it was bad back in 1996

[RJFerret]

Wowzers! I clicked the link and bang, there was the page. It's nice to have a page load in less time on AT&T U-Verse now than back in dialup days. Isn't it weird how we have these amazingly fast connections now but it takes pages longer to load?

I'm a web user rather than designer, and have never heard of this guy, but I'm glad you define him as a "guru"...I wish more adopted his example.

I immediate found the search without scrolling (I often just bail on websites without a search).

There was an obvious separation between categories of info, both by physical and graphic methods.

There was actual provided content with section titles, so I was able to very quickly find info without trying to discern it through various distractions.

I bet it would work great on my phone too.

Speaking of which, sadly it didn't take off, but one trick to a far better web experience was using the mobile version of websites! Much more usable: faster, content without spurious distractions... I wish every website had an m.- alternative to www.-

Isn't it horrifying that often I will reach for my phone to access the web when I'm sitting in front of my computer with an open web browser?

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.

What is the alternative?

[FlyingGuy]

Frames made it very simple to have you web content broken up into nice blocks. You could do all your navigation in one frame, that meant, one file contained your menus. You had one file to edit and you could produce a well defined, well behaved navigation system.

With the jihad against frames we were left with two options:

• The menu code had to be reproduced in every file you pulled in. Make a change to the menu system and if you served 1000 different pages, you had to change 1000 files.
• Serve it from a database, using php, ruby, perl, python or whatever. Massive complication since you had to build a CMS just to avoid getting smacked down or you had file includes all over the place in those same files, but to have a #include you had to use a scripting language, no more pure HTML for you.

ALL of this could have been solved by having the HTML spec provide a #include tag that would tell the browser to fetch that file eg: but no one seems to like that idea anymore then they likes framsets or iframes

As to Jakob Nielsen saying it breaks the user interface, that guy needs to get over himself in a big way. The web is evolving and changing all the time. As so many have said, the browser is not simply a page reproducer any more, those days are long gone, it has become an application container that allows applications, served from without to run in a defined and "secure" ( we hope ) application space on the local machine.

I for one advocate forking the whole notion. It is time to create and application shell that is specifically designed do just run applications of some specification. I propose that this can be done by making a tag to go along side as the top level tag and call . This would allow the "browser" to take one of two immediate actions:

• Start an Application Shell, load and run the app.
• Start the HTML rendering engine and display the page.

Further I propose that the navigation portion of be ported out to the browser and you simply load the elements of the menus and it is fed by a separate channel much like XMLhttprequest.