Controversial Web "Framing" Makes a Comeback 210
theodp writes "The WSJ reports that the controversial practice of framing seems to be making a comeback on the Web. Big sites like Digg, Facebook, Ask.com and StumbleUpon have all begun framing links recently, joining the likes of Google, which employs the technique for Image Search. Long ago, Jakob Nielsen argued that 'frames break the fundamental user model of the web page,' but, today's practitioners contend, 'it's a feature, not a bug,' and say it provides publishers with massive distribution they wouldn't otherwise have."
How to stop it (Score:5, Informative)
<script type="text/javascript"><!--
var _tl=top.location,_sl=self.location;if(_tl!=_sl)window.top.location=_sl;
//-->
</script>
Re:How to stop it (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow, good idea! Let's just introduce two more global variables in some messy code! actually, how about we don't and we use something anonymous like this (also don't use as they fuck up E4X:
<script type="text/javascript">
if (top.location != location) {
top.location = location;
}
</script>
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I have this variation in my HTML.
Ages ago I tested a bunch of them, and chose this.
Probably because it was the shortest one that worked with all browsers I could lay my hands on, or some other reason.
<script type="text/javascript">
if(top!=self)top.location.replace(self.location);
</script>
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I use a very similar script and it has always worked fine. For a while it didn't work with Safari, but it seems to now:
<SCRIPT type="text/javascript">
if(self!= top) top.location.href = self.location.href;
</SCRIPT>
Looking at it now for the first time in years it's probably slower than it needs to be, but it seems to do the trick.
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The difference is that assigning to href adds to the history, replace() "overwrites" the current history entry.
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This doesn't work if the majority of your users have javascript blocked for 3rd party domains. Doesn't everyone block 3rd party domains? Now we are back to frames being evil.
Re:How to stop it (Score:5, Funny)
if (top.location != location) {
window.location = "http://www.goatse.cx";
}
</script>
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Don't just spout phrases for the sake of it (Score:4, Insightful)
"It's a feature, not a bug" would make sense if we were talking about something that actually arose as a bug. People don't think about what they write these days, they just let out torrent upon torrent of brainfarts.
Re:Don't just spout phrases for the sake of it (Score:5, Funny)
People don't think about what they write these days, they just let out torrent upon torrent of brainfarts.
lol, i know just what you mean people are such morans these days!!! my friend does that all the time but shes a slut she went to see the new Batman movie with me and it was so funny, oh that reminds me no i forgot sorry
Re:Don't just spout phrases for the sake of it (Score:4, Funny)
Nor should someone who has just been whooshed by low-level parody.
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I am proud to say we didn't loose a single football player
So, all the football players are still locked in a room somewhere? Or perhaps they are chained up?
I suspect that you could have learned at least a few things by going to class, and that some of the football players still do some "creative" spelling.
Really, if you are writing about how people need to learn to spell (or proofread), you should make sure you can, too.
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"It's a feature, not a bug" would make sense if we were talking about something that actually arose as a bug. People don't think about what they write these days, they just let out torrent upon torrent of brainfarts.
Only if you're trying to be ironic. It _is_ a feature. It's not a bug. It's also not a rutabaga.
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what are you talking about? Googling for "filetype:torrent brainfart" gave me nothing at all.
~
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Plagiarism Detection (Score:2)
If this weren't slashdot, I'd say you were plagiarizing TFA.
IMO there should ALWAYS be an option to turn this kind of thing OFF. Then, what's the problem? Bonus points for a prefs link by the escape-button. What, no escape button? GET THEM.
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Personally, I'd prefer there be a setting to turn off the framing. Clicking the box to close it every time gets a little old. I'm not going to get angry about it, there's enough crap that takes screen space that I start thinking of alternatives.
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There is a setting to disable it
That depends, for which sites? Several sites do it, and I haven't found any such setting on the site that I use.
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Can I close the frame permanently if I don't want it at all on any site? That is the right question.
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If the frame has a button or such to close it, I don't have a problem with the frame.
I think this "It is eeeeeeevil!!!!" crowd got its panties in a bunch. Sure, there are lots of bad ways to use frames, but in and of itself frames are not a bad thing. In fact most, if not all of the examples mentioned are specifically examples of how to use frames RIGHT. They identify themselves, give you a way to break out of it, and allow you to continue to get the "Web 2.0"/AJAXy (or whatever buzzword you want to use) services from their site while letting you to see the pages you want to see. The old wa
Re:Can I close the frame? (Score:4, Insightful)
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That's like saying "in and of itself, using a cell phone or radio while driving is not bad". There are a very few exceptions where it's helpful. Communications for long-haul trucking is very helpful, and for delivery personnel to get directions at the delivery point in slow traffic. But it's so overused and so destructive in its normal use.
Erm, I do not see anything bad in using either cell phone or a radio while driving, and in fact I use both when I am on four wheels. Most vehicles comes with those items built in these days, so whats your point?
-Em
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Nope. None of them are examples of using frames right, since they break navigatio
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Nope. None of them are examples of using frames right, since they break navigation and bookmarking. Go RTFA, and in the RTFA, follow the link to Jakob Nielsen's article to learn about the problem of frames that you've overlooked.
You really want to stick to quoting a 1996 article whose chief concern is that there are many people using browsers earlier that IE3/Netscape2 and that search engines can't follow it? Give me a break. Things have changed in last 13 years. Yes you can bookmark it, yes you can break out of the frame easily, and now you can also get dynamic content from other sites integrated, something they did not even try in 1996.
-Em
Re:Can I close the frame? (Score:5, Informative)
Not that this affects you point, but for sites that don't offer that (I haven't come across any),
In firefox: right click -> this frame -> show only this frame, will sort you out, other browsers probably perform similarly.
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Sure, until you browse away from the original framed page (by following links on it), and then decide that the frame is no longer relevant, so you close it and OH HAI You're back to the original page.
There are no buttons to "close the frame". There are only buttons that take you to the original page, sans frame, from whatever page you are currently on.
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just curious, but couldn't this be solved by changing the button's static link to a javascript function that runs something like top.location = contentframe.location ?
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No, because of same-origin security - $EVIL_SITE's JavaScript can't read the location of the bottom frame.
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It is a pretty big problem with links to videos however... I click the link on facebook, it opens in the frame... and starts downloading and playing the video... when I go to close the frame, it has to reload the page, and so it restarts the video download and the video playback.. very annoying, wastes time and bandwidth
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I use framing on a toolbar style search site I created (a free too for music, it's not nearly a irritating as it sounds) and originally I'd hoped I could add a real close button because I don't think locking someone into frames is cool, I was a bit disappointed when I found yo
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The problem with most of those "close this frame" or "view only main frame" or whatever links/buttons tend to just go to whatever the frame was originally. This doesn't work if you've navigated away from the original page. It also will be painful if there's a half-filled out form on the page.
What we need is the ability to remove frames without reloading the page.
Also, Firefox has a "view this frame only" option in the context menu (right click), this is usually better than the site-provided buttons since it
not really (Score:2)
Re:Can I close the frame? (Score:5, Funny)
Agreed. As long as I can close it I could care less that it's there.
How much less could you care? This information is the only thing that stands between us and the knowledge of how much you do care!
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I swear I didn't do it! (Score:4, Funny)
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It was the single core Mac!
Feature? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a bug not a feature. It's pointless, stupid and annoying.
Facebook does it (with some links but not others) - and there's just no point to it. The link opens in a new tab and the old tab is still there. It might make sense if you were going to open the link in the same tab, but you're not.
What possible advantage is there in opening a link in a frame in a new tab - apart from annoying users?
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Feature? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the web equivalent of crappy programs throwing themselves in your system tray needlessly: gaining mindshare and visibility so they are more attractive to marketers.
Do they need to be there? Of course not. But they want to be, and most users put up with it. The blame lies equally with users who just say, "well, ok, I guess that's fine." They allow it to happen.
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If the target of the link is one point in a larger process potentially involving many such pages. Google Image Search is a perfect example of this.
Note, though, that Google Image search gives you a link that allows you to exit the process. That's more guts than most site developers have. They want your eyeballs on their page as long as possible. Letting the user escape the task demonstrates confidence that what you are doing for them is valuable.
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Do you know what "bug" and "feature" mean? A bug is an unintended and undesireable behaviour. Just because you don't like it doesn't make it a bug. Get over yourself (this applies to the summary too).
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Do you know what "tongue in cheek" and "get over it" mean?
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My security is compromised.
Admittedly with facebook et all they probably aren't stealing my passwords or form values.
But another side effect is that framing becomes "ok" for even less-well-known and less-accountable sites, even though it's clearly a very serious security issue.
Re:Beature Fug (Score:2)
So what is an unintended desirable behavior?
Programmer & ContentGuy: "This Bug Sux!"
Marketing PHB: "That's great for me!"
Make it a browser feature (Score:2)
Well as TFA gives several examples of, there are good uses of such frames. That's the problem... there IS some value here in many cases.
But reading this I think it's clear that we need a browser feature here. That is, something between an extension and straight HTML.
It could even just be that they use the code they already have for backward compatibility but add some kind of hint like 'toolbarframe=true' (ok, that's terrible, but you get my point) It has to identify in the frameset which part is a toolba
Finally the backlash hits (Score:5, Insightful)
I first started seeing this in Facebook. It was getting pretty annoying to have to close out a frame in order to see the web page at the full size of my browser window. Hopefully, these companies that do this realize that it just irritates people and doesn't improve the visitors' experience.
Re:Finally the backlash hits (Score:5, Funny)
The i's have it (Score:3, Informative)
I assume we are talking about i-frames here, not setting out an entire page using the old-fashioned Frameset method. Frameset layouts were a nightmare in many ways and their passing is a good thing, but using an i-frame to show some or all of a separate webpage on the page you are viewing can be very useful, and is perfectly kosher in terms of valid HTML and CSS as far as I know.
Re:The i's have it (Score:4, Interesting)
I assume we are talking about i-frames here, not setting out an entire page using the old-fashioned Frameset method.
You're wrong, though. They're talking about loading a frameset with a top page provided by them and the bottom page provided by someone else, just like google does with cached pages except for more or less all external links posted by users.
An IFRAME would be even more offensive, for reasons which should be obvious.
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<iframe id="diggiFrame" name="diggiFrame" noresize="noresize" src="http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/internet-censorship-us-or-just-law-enforcement" frameborder="0"></iframe>
It does seem to be easy to 'permanently' remove, but I'm not a 'fan' of wrapped content of any form.
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Well, I'm mostly talking about facebook in this case I think, but in any case it's largely irrelevant if the iframe is being used just as you would use a frameset. It still breaks things all to hell, causing me to link to facebook if I am stupid. (Or I used facebook, heh heh.)
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No, the iframe element is not a valid element in HTML 4.01 Strict.
It's good if the frame adds value (Score:5, Insightful)
It all depends on what the outer frame does. If it adds value to the link - e.g. as Google Image search does, which shows you the picture/allows you to magnify it - then I think that framing is a good idea.
If, on the other hand, it is just there to try to 'keep the users on your site', then it is plain annoying. If this comes back, so will the frame breakout scripts.
In any case, a 'close' button should always be provided.
In my opinion, the way Google Images frames external sites is exemplary, and should be the way others do it too.
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As usual, things are not black and white. The new Digg "bar" frame deal is just like having another menu bar in the top of your browser window, so at least in that respect it isn't all that intrusive... and personally, I got a kick out of using the "random" link feature on it.
I'm a 'new wave' web user who doesn't care if there's content from several different sites on one screen. Hell, a mashup like that is something I PREFER instead of having to load up multiple URLs just to see tidbits of information I
Re:It's good if the frame adds value (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe it was bad back in 1996 (Score:5, Interesting)
Jakob Nielsen argued that frames "broke the fundamental user model of the web page" ... back in 1996. Sorry, the user model of the web has fundamentally changed since then.
For example, in the google image case, I really like the frame because it serves an important purpose. Often times it takes much longer to load the target page than the top frame. If that loading takes too long, I can just click the "See full size image" to go directly to the image without having to load the whole page.
In any case, I always was amazed how Nielsen was heralded as this guru of web usability. He may have been early to the game, but I always thought most of his recommendations were bad. Just take a look at his website, http://www.useit.com./ [www.useit.com] Besides being god-awfully ugly, the lack of any real borders or section boundaries makes it really hard to find information quickly.
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Either way, don
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Web 2.0 is all about turning every tiny bit of the page in to its own frame (effectively) that can be re-populated with new content without re-loading the page.
Frames didn't die--they evolved and conquerd fucking EVERYTHING. They don't break the fundamental model of a modern web page, because they are the fundamental model of a modern web page, which is just a collection of boxes that all load data from a variety of different sources.
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Because Microsoft is trying to push MVC for web development doesn't mean it isn't a good paradigm to adhere to. Your data source should be just that... a source that provides data. Your UI widgets should be just that... blissfully unaware GUI objects. Then you have the "control" mechanism which takes data from the data source and loads the widgets, takes the changes from the widgets and passes them back to the data source.
Also, how in friggin gods name is a server side i
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Re:Maybe it was bad back in 1996 (Score:5, Insightful)
Framing was the best of three bad alternatives.
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How is framing a bad alternative? It does the job perfectly, its a great option, in that situation.
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Because it is essentially stealing from the website. As other posters have mentioned, many users don't bother to wait for the page to load and just go directly for the full size image. This is basically hotlinking with an extra click in there for the user, and considered bad practice. Frames may be the best solution in this case, but it still has flaws.
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Google isn't putting ads in the frame and does a good job of making sure that their branding is shown in the frame, and that there is a clear way to get to the original page. That is not "essentially stealing".
Back in the day, hotlinking meant that someone was using the image on a page without permission (i.e., as the src for an img element), not that a link to the image was posted (the idea that people shouldn't post direct links to content on the internet is preposterous).
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Because it is essentially stealing from the website. As other posters have mentioned, many users don't bother to wait for the page to load and just go directly for the full size image.
No, that is not 'stealing', and if I go to search for an image on Google Images, then I'm not wanting to go to some random website to dig around for the image. That would be an Epic Fail for an image search.
Of course I'm going to click on the image link before the rest of the shite that I was not searching for, nor interested in seeing takes time to show up. I would rather go straight to the image that I was searching for and be done with it.
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btw if you're going from "it is" to "its" you have to use an apostrophe. "it's spelled with an apostrophe."
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Not to mention #1 fails half the time because of blocks based by referrer.
Re:Maybe it was bad back in 1996 (Score:4, Interesting)
In any case, I always was amazed how Nielsen was heralded as this guru of web usability. He may have been early to the game, but I always thought most of his recommendations were bad. Just take a look at his website, http://www.useit.com./ [www.useit.com] Besides being god-awfully ugly, the lack of any real borders or section boundaries makes it really hard to find information quickly.
Seriously? I hadn't any trouble navigating that page. News is nicely separated from permanent content without using a menu. IMHO menus on webpages severely impact their usability in a bad way. Websites with menus on it are usually the ones where I get lost easily and don't find what I'm looking for. In most cases the search function is broken, too.
And about the page being ugly: it may be styled minimalistic, but that's exactly the way I like it. I don't like sites with much bling-bling like http://www.space.com/ [space.com] and especially game/movie sites because it distracts me from the actual content. But as both seem to correlate reciprocally, that's not a big problem to me...
Re:Maybe it was bad back in 1996 (Score:5, Insightful)
Wowzers! I clicked the link and bang, there was the page. It's nice to have a page load in less time on AT&T U-Verse now than back in dialup days. Isn't it weird how we have these amazingly fast connections now but it takes pages longer to load?
I'm a web user rather than designer, and have never heard of this guy, but I'm glad you define him as a "guru"...I wish more adopted his example.
I immediate found the search without scrolling (I often just bail on websites without a search).
There was an obvious separation between categories of info, both by physical and graphic methods.
There was actual provided content with section titles, so I was able to very quickly find info without trying to discern it through various distractions.
I bet it would work great on my phone too.
Speaking of which, sadly it didn't take off, but one trick to a far better web experience was using the mobile version of websites! Much more usable: faster, content without spurious distractions... I wish every website had an m.- alternative to www.-
Isn't it horrifying that often I will reach for my phone to access the web when I'm sitting in front of my computer with an open web browser?
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Wowzers! I clicked the link and bang, there was the page.
If browsers rendered the text before anything else (or at least rendered the top bit, without having to download *everything* first), then this would be less of an issue.
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And, as they say in my language (loosely translated): "if my grandma had wheels she'd be a bicycle."
But the fact is that she doesn't, so she's not. Likewise, web browsers do not render that way, and so load times *are* an issue.
Web developers should design for real browsers, not for imaginary perfect browsers.
-dZ.
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It would be easier for the browsers to fix that simple issue, than to justify reducing adverts/gfx that the market seems to want/need.
So easy, and then web page designers can go crazy if they want.
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Agreed; an explanation is that in the days his presupposition was that every page should load in less than y sec (I think it was 4) for e_v_e_r_y user.
CC.
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It's a lucky sperm club thing.
As for why you have to wait to post, it's so that you will think a little bit before you go and say something like, oh, say, "the lucky sperm club runs the world" and get yourself in trouble. (*fortunately I'm already in trouble)
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Vote using your clicks. (Score:2)
I primarily use rss feeds to find new articles. I was tracking digg by rss until they started framing.
I immediately dropped all news feeds from them and avoided using their site. Once I read
that digg made frames an opt-in feature, I added Digg back into my news reader.
If I find some other site(like Slashdot) were to do the same thing, they would have one
less set of eyeballs looking at their site.
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OK, but at the risk of asking the obvious, if you're only tracking their RSS feeds then you're not really giving their site your eyeballs anyway, are you? Or do you mean you used the RSS feed to spot articles of interest, but you did actually visit the site to discuss those articles?
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I still visit Digg or Slashdot to read the full article description,
click associated links and read comments. So my eyeballs are on the site.
I just will not put up with some site framing the site they are linking to.
google images only (Score:3, Interesting)
Google Images, on the other hand, has increased porn hunting efficiency by at least 200%, imo.
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stumbleupon's frame means you don't need to install the extension, which is a great move:
1)It gives the site more screen realestate
2)It's one less addon
3)It works with all (modern) browsers not just those they have an extension for.
Flashblock+frames on firefox3.5 (linux) (Score:2)
Does anybody else have problems with flash/videos not playing in frames when flashblock is running on firefox3.5 on linux. /minefield(64)+flash(64) , ill just shut up and eventually get round to fixing my mess or reopen the bug report i closed when it work for while the otherday
I have an entirely 64bit system here and don't have the time to be messing with 32bit stuff, so if somebody could tell me it work for them on linux with minefield(32)/minefield(64)+nspluginwrapper
Follow the money (Score:2)
Let's see why they want to do this. Is there some specific click behavior that frames enforce that forces additional clicks to ad pages? Or that significantly reduces bandwidth for the servers?
I admit that most frames are very, very badly designed, creating incompatibilities with browsers.
What's the underlying motivation? (Score:3, Insightful)
Back when frames last reared their ugly head, I noticed that many of the sites that were using them were doing so to wrap other people's content with their ads. Then came frame-killing code (the bit of JavaScript mentioned elsewhere being one example).
Did the content thieves just lay low until we got lazy and forgot about them?
"content thieves" (Score:2)
are you sure you're posting on the right site using words like "content thieves"?
It's not stealing... it's not even copyright infringement (given that your page is publicly available). It might be against some manner of ToS if you serve the page behind a login and some other site uses that login and then re-serves it to the public (no, a 'public' ToS is pretty much moot). Maybe you could argue a misrepresentation or, worst case, fraud scenario.. but 'content thieves'?
=====
As for frames.. they're not all t
You know... (Score:2)
You do know that, at least for Digg, you can disable it. I did. I hated it. Of course, Digg is not at all what it used to be. Which is a shame....
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Umm (Score:2)
Frames suck! Period. It's bad enough that MySpace relishes their circa 1996 page styles now this?
innoculate yourself (Score:2)
if (top.location != location) { ;}
top.location.href = document.location.href
I don't think many people appreciate this. (Score:2)
I say, "It provides publishers with distribution that people don't want."
Seriously: it pisses me off to no end when someone gives me a link on Twitter, and it turns out to be a Digg frame with a site inside of it. I immediately get rid of the frame, because I do not want Digg to be following my movements on the site. And that must means that I have to load the page twice... once in the frame, and again out of it.
It
What is the alternative? (Score:4, Informative)
Frames made it very simple to have you web content broken up into nice blocks. You could do all your navigation in one frame, that meant, one file contained your menus. You had one file to edit and you could produce a well defined, well behaved navigation system.
With the jihad against frames we were left with two options:
ALL of this could have been solved by having the HTML spec provide a #include tag that would tell the browser to fetch that file eg: but no one seems to like that idea anymore then they likes framsets or iframes
As to Jakob Nielsen saying it breaks the user interface, that guy needs to get over himself in a big way. The web is evolving and changing all the time. As so many have said, the browser is not simply a page reproducer any more, those days are long gone, it has become an application container that allows applications, served from without to run in a defined and "secure" ( we hope ) application space on the local machine.
I for one advocate forking the whole notion. It is time to create and application shell that is specifically designed do just run applications of some specification. I propose that this can be done by making a tag to go along side as the top level tag and call . This would allow the "browser" to take one of two immediate actions:
Further I propose that the navigation portion of be ported out to the browser and you simply load the elements of the menus and it is fed by a separate channel much like XMLhttprequest.
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I agree. There's a lot of boiler-plate JavaScript code that merely makes up for the fact that the web wasn't designed to support applications. Common web app functions should be available as first class elements, not hacks.
Looking at Jakob Nielsen's bio, I don't see why his advice should be considered particularly qualified.
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Note that the article isn't talking about the use of frames to construct a Web site. It's describing the practice of using frames to embed entire pages from another Web site inside a frame on a page of the framer's Web site.
You can see the difference if you look at the URLs. If you go to http://www.slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org], you'll see Slashdot's page with that URL in the URL bar. But imagine going to http://www.silverglass.org/slashdot/ [silverglass.org] and seeing Slashdot's page with a Silverglass Tech title at the top and a silvergl
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I'll do worse than that: I'll add malicious code that makes their site look bad whenever they try to view my site in it, but is completely harmless to anyone visiting or linking to my site in the normal way. I suspect replacing parts of the enclosing frame with either a prominent and embarrassing explanatory message or perhaps some NSFW or politically offensive content would be sufficient.
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Except if your site looks nasty when linked from Google with their little frame, the visitor is going to assume your site is nasty, not that it has anything to do w/ Google.
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You jest and/or troll, but some people [firedoglake.com] seriously suggest that. Oh noes people are stealing your users, except they still go to your site, still count as pagehits and some still click your ads/comment on your threads/subscribe to your mailinglist!