Frames & Form

Frames, how it works

Frames are used to display an entire web page into another one. Basically, you can create several pages and use them to create a template that will ease your job. For an exemple, you can create a page that will show a menu in one frame and the contents of each link of said menu in the other frame, all that on the same page. You can use FRAMSET, FRAME and IFRAME elements to do so.

Frames as implemented today are problematic for several reasons:

• Without scripting, they tend to break the "previous page" functionality offered by browsers.
• It is impossible to refer to the "current state" of a frameset with a URI; once a frameset changes contents, the original URI no longer applies.
• Opening a frame in a new browser window can disorient or simply annoy users.

<FRAMESET ...> Some elements:

• COLS: how many cols in the frameset
• ROWS: how many rows in the frameset
• FRAMEBORDER: if the frames should have borders
• FRAMESPACING: space between the frames

<FRAMESET ...>

This tag defines the general layout of a web page that uses frames. <FRAMESET ...> is used in conjunction with <FRAME ...> and <NOFRAMES>.

Forms, how it works

<FORM>...</FORM>

This tag delimits the content of a FORM.

• Action="URL" this attribute identifies the URL of the program or script which accepts the contents of the form for processing. If this attribute is absent, the BASE URI of the Form is used.
• Method="get|post" this attribute this attribute indicates the variation in the Froms-handling protocol which will be used in processing the Action program or script.
• Encytpe="string" this attribute identifies the media type (See RFC1590) that will be used for encoding the name/value pairs of the Form's data. This is needed for when the protocol identified in Method does not have its own format. The default encoding for all Forms is application/x-www-form-urlencoded.