Hi Trevor,
I had a look and the home page seems very straightforward.
Perhaps I forgot to mention that the home page is *not* the frameless
frameset. I just threw a simple HTML document together to link to the
documentation pages, which are all frameless framesets. For example:
http://www.dynamicsystems.com/weatherservices/documentation/DsiGlobal.Imaging.htm
But there are only 2 "frames". One thing I noted was the lack of
scrollbars as the page gets smaller (by resizing, anyway)
This sounds like you were looking at one of the frameless frameset pages,
but your remark about "lack of scrolling" is odd. Both "frames" will scroll
both horizontally and vertically if the content is larger than the div
containing it, by resizing, or for any other reason. As I mentioned, both I
and a colleague at work extensively tested this in both IE and FireFox.
Let me know if there are any other questions. I realize that this particular
solution is not exactly the 3-frame scenario you described, but it is an
example of how one can use CSS, JavaScript, and HTML to emulate the behavior
and look of a frameset. If you, for example, look at the above page in
FireFox, and turn off CSS, you will see that it is a single HTML document.
There are 2 outer divs which form the outside "frame," with 3 divs inside
them. The TOC div is the first. The "Sizer bar" is the second div, and the
Content is the third div. With CSS turned off, the TOC appears at the top,
with the sizer bar below that, and the Content div below that. I used a
combination of CSS styles, including the "float" style, to get them to sit
next to each other, and JavaScript to handle the dynamic resizing when the
page is resized, or when the sizer bar is dragged left or right.
In order to make the links behave like a frameset, I use a JavaScript
function on the click event of the link. It "hijacks" the link event, and
scrolls the Content div to the location of the target, using the various
properties and styles of the elements in the page to do the measuring. It
also maintains the scrolled position of the div when the frame sizes are
changed by resizing or dragging the sizer bar. This is largely due to the
slight differences in the IE and Mozilla object models, which behave
differently when a hyperlink to a target frame is clicked. It also maintains
the URL of the page despite links to the Content frame, just as a frameset
would behave.
Also because of the peculiarities of each browser DOM, it uses a fairly
sophisticated mechanism to do the calculations. But the JavaScript and CSS
are all there for anyone to study. I *would* have protected the HTML and
JavaScript code, but... ;-)
In any case, as I mentioned, it is not intended as a solution to your
problem, but as an illustration of how such a framesless frameset can be
made, theoretically with any number of frames. But as I also mentioned, it
took me about a month to write it, and re-designing it to support multiple
configurations of frames would be extremely fun, but consume much more time
than I have available, probably another month or so.
AFAIK, this is the only "frameless frameset" on the WWW. At any rate, I have
never been able to find one, so I rolled my own.
--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
Microsoft MVP
..Net Developer
Who is Mighty Abbott?
A twin turret scalawag.