Re: lynx-dev LYNX: it's "frames" sites complain about, not "forms"

[mattack]

On Fri, 28 Aug 1998, David Combs wrote:
>I don't even know what a "frame" is -- does
>lynx support them (ie is there some mozilla-type name
>I have to insert instead of lynx to get them to work?)

The technical answer is "yes".

The realistic answer is "sort of".

While I honestly don't understand how frames work from an HTML standpoint,
from a user-level standpoint, frames are separate chunks of data that you 
see in different areas of the window, on a GUI browser with frames.

For example, you can have a scrolling list on the left column of the
window, and then when you click on an item in the scrolling list, the
data that the link represents shows up in the right half of the screen.

While in general I hate frames with a passion, there are one or two sites
where this is actually reasonable (in a GUI browser).  The Coming Attractions
web site has a frames version, and there's a DVD site that hasn't been
updated in a long time that also used this format..  I even complained about
the latter at one point, and I always with there was a non-frames version
available... but sometimes the "scrolling list then show the contents on the
right" works decently.


Now, here's the problem with how Lynx currently works:  You don't actually
see all of the frames at once.  You enter each frame separately, and view the
data inside of that frame.

Often you can get used to it on some sites and know which frames to ignore,
such as navigation links.

I do not know this for a fact, but I believe a large reason there hasn't
been any attempt at doing better frames support is because a site that
uses frames very much expects a screen wider than 80 columns..  So 
if/when the horizontally scrolling stuff is ever implemented, then better
frames support would be a good thing to tackle then.


So basically -- if a site you use uses frames, try it.  You can probably
get it to work reasonably well...  Except for those scrolling list type ones
I mentioned above which work well only in a GUI environment.