Comment by alganet
14 hours ago
> They were never good
They were good enough.
> For some sites, it wasn't a big deal
Precisely my point.
> POSIX specs or Javadocs
Hey, they work for me.
> the best way to fix these problems with frames is to use JavaScript.
Some small amounts of javascript. Mainly, proxy the state for the main frame to the address bar. No need for virtual dom, babel, react, etc.
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_Again_, you're arguing like I'm defending frames for use today. That's not what I'm doing.
Many websites follow a "left navigation, center content" overall layout, in which the navigation stays somehow stationary and the content is updated. Frames were broken, but were in the right direction. You're nitpicking on the ways they were broken instead of seeing the big picture.
Directionally correct but badly done can poison an idea. Frames sucked and never got better.
Along with other issues, this gave rise to AJAX and SPAs and JS frameworks. A big part of how we got where we are today is because the people making the web standards decided to screw around with XHTML and "the semantic web" (another directionally correct but badly done thing!) and other BS for about a decade instead of improving the status quo.
So we can and often should return to ancestor but if we're going to lay blame and trace the history, we ought to do it right.
Your history is off, and you are mixing different eras and browser standards with other initiatives.
Frames gave place to (the incorrect use of) tables. The table era was way worse than it is today. Transparent gif spacers, colspan... it was all hacks.
The table era gave birth to a renewal of web standards. This ran mostly separately from the semantic web (W3C is a consortium, not a single central group).
The table era finally gave way to the jQuery era. Roughly around this time, browser standards got their shit together... but vendors didn't.
Finally, the jQuery era ended with the rise of full JS frameworks (backbone first, then ember, winjs, angular, react). Vendors operating outside standards still dominate in this era.
There's at least two whole generations between frames and SPAs. That's why I used the word "ancestor", it's 90s tech I barely remember because I was a teenager. All the other following eras I lived through and experienced first hand.
The poison on the frames idea wore off ages ago. The fact that websites not made with them resemble their use is a proof of that, they just don't share the same implementation. The "idea" is seen with kind eyes today.
I feel like we're mostly in violent agreement.
The key point about frames in the original context of this thread as I understood it was that they allowed a site to only load the content that actually changes. So accounting for the table-layout era doesn't really change my perspective: frames were so bad, that web sites were willing to regress to full-page-loads instead, at least until AJAX came along -- though that also coincides with the rise of the (still ongoing) div-layout era.
I agree wholeheartedly that the concept of partial page reloading in a rectilinear grid is alive and well. Doing that with JavaScript and CSS is the whole premise of an SPA as I understand it, and those details are key to the difference between now and the heyday of frames. But there was also a time when full-page-loading was the norm between the two eras, reflecting the disillusionment with frames as they were implemented and ossified.
The W3C (*) spent a good few years working on multiple things most of which didn't pan out. Maybe I'm being too harsh, but it feels like a lot of their working groups just went off and disconnected from practice and industry for far too long. Maybe that was tangential to the ~decade-long stagnation of web standards, but that doesn't really change the point of my criticism.
* = Ecma has a part in this too, since JavaScript was standardized by them instead of W3C for whatever reason, and they also went off into la-la land for roughly the same period of time
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