Unpopular opinion: Frames were actually useful for navigation back in 1996

I was poking around the Wayback Machine last night and pulled up an old Geocities site I made in 96 with a left frame for navigation. It loaded lightning fast because the nav frame cached once and never reloaded. But then I looked at a redesign from 1999 that ditched frames for a server-side include menu, and suddenly every page load took 3-4 seconds on dial-up. Which was actually worse for usability in practice. So here's my debate: were frames really that bad, or did we just overcorrect because they looked dated? Anyone else remember hitting the back button and losing your spot in a frame layout?

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wesley87310d ago

Buddy of mine lost a whole term paper that way.