Learnings of the Week (ROLLORATA)

FRAMES and CASCADING STYLE SHEET

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL.

CSS can be used locally by the readers of web pages to define colors, fonts, layout, and other aspects of document presentation. It is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation (written in CSS). This separation can improve content accessibility, provide more flexibility and control in the specification of presentation characteristics, and reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content (such as by allowing for tableless web design). CSS can also allow the same markup page to be presented in different styles for different rendering methods, such as on-screen, in print, by voice (when read out by a speech-based browser or screen reader) and on Braille-based, tactile devices. CSS specifies a priority scheme to determine which style rules apply if more than one rule matches against a particular element. In this so-called cascade, priorities or weights are calculated and assigned to rules, so that the results are predictable.

Frames allow for multiple ".html" documents to be displayed inside of one browser window at a time. This means that one page has no content on it, but rather tells the browser which web pages you would like to open. With the addition of CSS and PHP, frames have become outdated, but if you wish to use them, read on.

Frames are most typically used to have a menu in one frame, and content in another frame. When someone clicks a link on the menu that web page is then opened on the content page. Here is a classic example of a basic "index" frameset with a menu on the left and content on the right.

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frameset - The parent tag that defines the characteristics of this frames page. Individual frames are defined inside it.

frameset cols="#%, *"- Cols(columns) defines the width that each frame will have. In the above example we chose the menu (the 1st column) to be 30% of the total page and used a "*", which means the content (the 2nd column) will use the remaining width for itself.

frame src="" -The location of the web page to load into the frame.

A good rule of thumb is to call the page which contains this frame information "index.html" because that is typically a site's main page.