Tim Rowledge writes:
On Tue 28 Jul, Mark Guzdial wrote:
within Squeak. (Please don't ever implement frames! :-)
Surely frames would be easy to provide simply by inserting a new browser window? Not much ugly about that is there? :-) The problem with not having frame support is that lots of useful websites just don't work without them anymore. Annoying, but true.
Pragmatically, I agree, some frames support is important. At first, I'm just going to copy Lynx's really cheap frame support: put links to the sub-frames. I get a real kick out of visiting arrogant pages say "Your browser doesn't support frames. Use another browser", and then clicking on in. Eventually, frames in Scamper will probably look the same as however tables look. But it's not a real high priority for me personally.
Incidentally, it's amazing what lynx can do with just an 80x25 screen of text; I had been using it lately to avoid downloading netscape, and actually have ended up not missing netscape at all. What many people consider to be the basics for a web browser, for instance the above implication that frames must be implemented and furthermore implemented in a certain way, really is overly specific. There's more to browsing the web than Netscape and Internet Explorer.
Back to the matter at hand, frames philosophically ARE ugly. They talk about not only page layout, but window layout, in a language that is supposed to be about content description. Even worse than frames is Javascript, which talks about windowing *behavior*. Both frames and Javascript are encrustations which have developed and become popular simply because "everyone" uses web browsers that are so similar.
Maybe the Squeak community can come up with a Web browsing system that's not so similar....
Lex
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