ah, yes; for many, the very mention of the word ``frames'' causes accelerated breathing, irregular heartbeats, profuse sweating, intense nervousness, and extreme, bitter hatred. i have every certainty that html frames were invented with good intentions, just like the poor sap responsible for the tag intended no ill when he created his abomination. in fact, frames are extremely useful for complicated formatting. actually, the real bone to pick with frames is not their implementation, but their interface.
from everyone i've ever heard gripe about those @#$%^&*( frames, the complaint is the same --- you can't get rid of them, or if you use the back button to see what you just saw, you're accidentally out of the frames. if you want ot see the page source, you see instead the frameset. honestly, all these woes are solved by using a more modern browser (and so goes yet another shameless plug for my fave, netscape communicator) still, the real problem here is not with the frames --- it is with the fact that the frame interface is not completely and robustly defined. it wouldn't be very hard to make an attribute that help you blow away the frames. also, you can have new pages pop up in new browsers... it's as much the fault of the programmer as anything.
here's an example of the evils of frames. in developing the frames-based website for ee499 (in which we're designing the 1999 SouthEastCON hardware design competition) i've implemented a navigation bar that always targets the main frame. the main frame almost always targets itself. no big deal. except when i put in several placeholder tags... of the form <a href=""></a> apparently the default behaviour here is to load the index of the directory containing that file. the index happened also to be a frameset...
i must admit, though, that i'm fond of the down-to-infinity look.
and then there's this one that i had just for the halibut.... "my, what big i's you have!"
