Layout and Sizing

How do I layout and size frames?

The Frame Document, (or FRAMESET), will tell the browser how to display the frames. The person viewing your frames pages never actually sees the FRAMESET page.

There are many other codes you can add to enhance your frames. You will see that your frames may have scrollbars on the tops and sides depending on the size of your frame content, and the size of the screen or browser being used to view the page. You can turn these off by adding SCROLLING="no" inside your FRAME SRC tag. The only danger in using this tag, is if the person viewing your page is using a small monitor, some of your page may not be seen.

You can have your frames split vertically or horizontally by adding ROWS or COLUMNS in your FRAMESET tag. You may also stipulate the size of these frames, either in pixels or percentage of screen.

An example of this would be:
<FRAMESET COLS="25%,*">
   <FRAME SRC="URL1">
   <FRAME SRC="URL2">
</FRAMESET>
This would give you two vertical frames, the left frame will fill up 25% of the screen and the right frame would fill up the rest. The * means use all the rest of the space. You can use a number of pixels instead of a percent. For example, if your navigation window uses buttons that are all 150 pixels wide you could specify an exact width instead of a percent. Remember, if you use an exact dimension, be sure one of your frames is set to * as an "elastic" to account for people viewing with different monitor settings. i.e. 640 x 480.

Another example would be:
<FRAMESET ROWS="150,200,*">
    <FRAME SRC="URL1">
        <FRAME SRC="URL2">
    <FRAME SRC="URL3">
</FRAMESET>
This would be for a three row frame page. The top frame would be 150 pixels high, the middle frame would be 200 pixels high, and the bottom frame would fill up the remaining screen.

Another way to do this is
<FRAMESET ROWS="150,*,2*">
In that way, the first column is 150 pixels wide, and the rest of the screen is divided into two remaining sections with the third space being twice as large as the first. That's what the 2* specifies.

INTRO | LAYOUT | TARGETING | MULTIPLE | NO FRAMES