Frames have enjoyed wide popularity in recent years. They do give a designer a way to control presentation of a page. Dave Raggett expresses the enthusiasm many feel about using frames when he concludes that the frame format "makes possible a quantum jump in sophistication."
However, there are some problems when using frames:
If your viewer knows to right click and open the frame in a new window, she or he may get around these first three problems. However, why create a frame when your viewer has to break out of it to find it useful? There is also a way to handle this problem using a cgi script. However, in my opinion there are better and more fun uses for cgi scripts. That is a lot of work just to make your framed site usable.
These problems can discourage your audience. For example, the on-line journal A List Apart has several useful articles about web standards, accessibility, and design considerations. However, I have not included many references to the site because its frame format makes it difficult to link directly to the articles. Fortunately, the journal recently began to include bookmarks to the articles outside their frames.
After doing three sites with frames, I decided that in the future I will only use frames for an intranet where I know all the computers and people could use frames.
Perhaps it is easier to prepare the "text-only" pages that fill your frameset since you do not have to duplicate the navigation bars or banners on each page. In addition, the files posted to the site are smaller since they avoid unnecessary repetition of elements.
Perhaps some people like to scroll up and down a frame.
Perhaps frames increase the sense of interactivity on a site.
Perhaps I'll just leave a discussion of the advantages to the ListServ. What do you like about using frames? Send your ideas to the ListServ