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NWE Help: Web: Authoring: HTML: Frames: Frame Tags

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What does a frame tag do?

Once you have your frameset created, you need to set up each individual frame. You can do so with FRAME (frame source) tags Since each frame loads a separate web page, you need to make sure that the pages you're going to load have been created already.

How many frame tags do I need?

You need one frame tag for each frame you create. Thus, in our examples, framesets one and three require 2 frame tags, and frameset two requires three.

It's also important to know what order the FRAME tags are placed in. When a frameset distributes frame information, it always works from left to right and top to bottom. This means that if you use two rows in your frameset, the first FRAME tag you include will set the values for the top row on your screen.

Frame example

Here is a sample FRAME tag, copied from our examples page and color-coded for our purposes here:


<FRAMESET rows="100,*" framespacing="0" frameborder="1" border="1">
     <FRAME src="page5.html" name="body" scrolling="no" noresize bordercolor="#00FF00">
</FRAMESET>

<FRAME ... >

The frame tag is used to set up the data for each window (or frame) of your frameset. The frame tag does not have a closing tag, so all you need is to insert this tag inside the frameset and set the attributes.

src="page5.html"

The src attribute tells the browser the "source" of the page to be loaded into the frame. The data inside the quotes is a URL, the web address for the page to load. Often, you will want to use a relative URL to indicate a file in the same directory as the frameset. In the example here, we selected page5.html to be loaded into the frame.

name="body"

The name attribute is very important. The value you place in the quotes following the name attribute is the name of the frame mentioned here. For instance, in our example we've named the frame body. Though these names do little when you first load your frameset, they are crucial for when you begin to link to and from your frameset.

scrolling="no"

The optional scrolling attribute allows you to disallow scrollbars on your readers' windows. The problem with using this feature is that if your user has a small screen or browser window, they might not be able to read all of your page.

noresize

Normally, when a frameset includes the default border between frames, a user may drag that frame to adjust the size of the windows. If you want to keep them from doing so, use the noresize attribute.

bordercolor="#00FF00"

The bordercolor attribute allows you to define the color of the default border that appears between your frames. Only the first FRAME tag to have this attribute will affect the border shared by two FRAME tags.