Monday, April 19, 2010

No more frames!

If you have been following the development of the HTML5 standard at all, then you're probably ahead of me on this one.  This is my first week that I'm not teaching in a while, so I'm getting caught up with a little "light reading" (pr: reading web standards and specifications).

After a rather assertive student argued with me the merits of using frames in web pages a couple of weeks ago, I found it rather pleasing to learn that it looks like the W3C will be removing the frame, frameset and noframes tags with the release of the HTML5 specification.  These elements specifically are being removed,

"because their usage affected usability and accessibility for the end user in a negative way."
Hmm.  That sounds rather familiar.

Keep in mind that HTML5 is a working draft and may (probably will) change before it is released.  You can read about these and the other currently absent elements at www.w3.org/TR/2010/WD-html5-diff-20100304/#absent-elements.