August 25, 1997
DR. WEBSITE: How To Set Up Borderless Frames
Dear Dr. Website: I want to upgrade my site from frames to borderless frames. Microsoft FrontPage doesn't seem to support that type of development; it only has a frames wizard.By David Fiedler and Scott Clark
Is this an ActiveX, Java, or HTML thing, where you have to do something special to make this happen? Or is there a GUI package that has wizards available to create frames and borderless frames?
Before you give up on FrontPage, check out the latest beta of FrontPage 98. It allows you to easily adjust the frame border (or table or frame) properties by right-mouse clicking on them. This allows you to set the border to FALSE and the framespacing and frameborder to zero, as indicated here:
<frameset framespacing="0" border="false" cols="146,*" frameborder="0">The seamless frame border this creates looks good on Netscape Navigator 3 and 4, as well as Microsoft Internet Explorer 3 and 4. It's so easy you don't need a wizard. And if you code manually, it's a cinch to include the code in your frameset tag.A Touch of Gray
Dear Dr. Website: Why is it that sometimes, after you hit a Web page, the Back or Forward button in the toolbar will be grayed out and you cannot go back to the previous page? I noticed some pages have a META tag to indicate "no cache" for some reason. But sometimes I can't find such code in a page. And why do they do that?
There are generally two ways to ask a page to not be cached. The first method is to deliberately instruct the browser not to cache the file, using a META tag--as you noticed--in the <HEAD> portion of the file, like this:
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">This would be included along with another directive that claims the file has expired at some past date, and shown as this:<META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires" CONTENT="Mon, 01 Jan 1990 12:34:56 GMT">The reasons for doing this are many and varied, but it's usually because the page changes often and omitting the "back" option ensures that the viewer will get the correct, current content.Another reason to do this is to prevent a new visitor from seeing private information that someone has posted to a page. An unscrupulous HTML writer might put it there in hopes of artificially increasing page views.
A third reason you may encounter a "no cache" page is that an HTML file may be generated by a program or served from a database. In such a case, the file may not even exist in the same form the next time you go to it, so the browser doesn't really know how to go "back" to something that's not there.
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Keywords: html, site_management
Date: 19970818