Welcome. In April of 1997 I put up a page called "Frames in Six Easy Lessons." I'd just rebuilt my own home page with a banner across the top, a menu down the left side and my stuff in the middle, three panes, like a real software program, and I was so proud of it I wanted everyone to be able to do the same thing. Plenty of people did. The tutorial went around. People linked to it from their "Webmaster Resources" pages. The counter below started to move.

Then the mail started. Not thank-you mail. Help mail. "My whole site is loading inside my menu." "My sister can't bookmark my recipe page." "Somebody else's web site is stuck in the middle of mine and I can't get it out." I answered something like four hundred of those over two years. Then my own mother tried to send her bridge club the page with my son's Little League pictures on it, and all nine ladies got my front page, and she called me long distance to ask why the Internet was broken.

That was the day I took the frames off my own site. It's also the day this page turned into what it is now: the tutorial, still here because people still ask, and right next to it the case against, because somebody ought to tell you before you do it.

You'll notice this page looks like it's in frames: navy strip on top, gray border, white pane in the middle. It isn't. It's a table with a navy row. You can bookmark it. You can e-mail it to your mother. That's the whole point.

Questions I get every week, answered in one line each

Do I need frames to have the same menu on every page?
No. Copy the menu into every page. It's ten lines. Your text editor has Copy and Paste.

How do I get rid of the gray bar between my frames?
There are three attributes and you need all three, because the two big browsers disagree. Lesson 5.

Why does my whole site open up inside the little menu frame?
You left out the TARGET on your links. Lesson 3.

Somebody put my page inside their frames. How do I get out?
Four lines of JavaScript. Lesson 6.

What's an IFRAME?
A frame that floats in the middle of an ordinary page. Internet Explorer has had them since version 3. Netscape 4 doesn't know what they are and skips right over them, so half your visitors will never see what's inside one.

So should I use frames?
Read the case against first. If you still want to, I won't stop you, and the lessons will get you there.