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Re: Frame Avoidance

for

From: Kynn Bartlett
Date: Apr 9, 2003 12:02PM

Hi Tim,

What you have here is a failure of your Web publishing process
that leads to potential inaccessibility problems.

Your difficulty is this: You need a way to build your navigation
links once, and have them appear site-wide.

There are a number of solutions to this.

(1) Frames are, as many people have found, one of the worst
solutions. You are correct for discarding these for usability
and accessibility reasons.

(2) Server-side includes (SSI), mentioned already on this list,
are a very good solution. A server-side include is a tag which
is parsed by the server before the content is sent to the
browser; they can be set to run commands on the site or
simply include a portion of text from elsewhere.

(3) Server-side programming languages such as PHP can be
used much as SSI, to insert content where appropriate.

(4) Ultimately what you are going to need will be a better
process for Web publishing than simply serving up flat
pages. That is the Web publishing paradigm of the last
century, and we are in the 21st Century now. Acceptable
Web publishing strategies for 2003 MUST include some
kind of content management system (CMS) rather than
relying on static HTML files.

The simplest CMS can be assembled together using server side
includes or PHP, with flat "content" files and autogenerated HTML
output. This can be delivered on the fly, or can be generated as
HTML output documents whenever the site is updated.

A more advanced solution uses a database and/or XML documents
for content storage, but this is also very much doable on a
homegrown basis.

You can get pre-built content management systems, anything from
Movable Type (free for non-commercial use) to Vignette (thousands
of dollars). I recommend the open source or free versions for
most uses.

An existing site will need to be converted to use a content management
system, but this typically only has to be done once! There are a
number of benefits, including ease of maintenance, and also
increased accessibility options such as alternate interfaces
which become near-trivial to generate (harder to perfect, but the
actual creation is simple).

This was one of the topics in my recent talk at the CSUN conference
on 21st century Web accessibility, which you can find linked from
the Maccessibility.com blog:

http://www.maccessibility.com/archive/000254.php

--Kynn


On Wednesday, April 9, 2003, at 11:21 AM, Tim Harshbarger wrote:

> Hi,
>
> We have a web site for our team that we are doing maintenance on.