Geoff Chappell - Software Analyst
Among the known problems are several (though a thankfully diminishing number) that seem important enough to warn about, or at least to assure that I do mean to attend to them.
If your browser is Internet Explorer and you place this site in the Restricted Zone, then although frames are not actually disabled, the browser draws the frames but does not load any content into them. I don’t think there’s anything I can do about that.
Mozilla Firefox does not show the intended borders between the frames. Rather, the borders are present, as spacing between the frames, but are white, even in a variety of configurations for such things as background colour. If you know how to get this particular browser to display flat coloured borders between frames, please write to me with the solution. Opera is no better: it fills the space between frames with its own choice of colour (apparently always the ButtonFace system colour). If only for now, I adjust other elements to match these particular browsers’ lack of colour or choice of colour.
Apple Safari and Google Chrome don’t even show space for the frame borders. Among the consequences is that no user-interface support is available for resizing the TOC. If you want to resize the TOC, you can do so by manually editing the URL. For instance, appending “&tw=300” (without the quotes) sets the TOC’s width to 300 pixels. You only have to do this once: the scripts will maintain your width specification in the URL as you move from page to page.
Of course, I appreciate that frames have very little definition in the HTML specification. Some would argue against using frames at all, but I have found no alternative that is quite as functional. These frames actually are used as frames, with content to be drawn from files that are better kept independent of one another. If any HTML authors read this and believe that the functionality can be replaced, then please write to me for my enlightenment and presumably for the benefit of other readers who should be spared from frames.
Note that frames are not needed by this website if you disable JavaScript. The trade-off is that you then don’t get the dynamic TOC for navigation and you go without some refinements such as tooltips for explaining inline formatting.
Logs at the server show that some browsers make heavy work of the TOC by requesting over and over the same tiny image files that serve as list-item markers. Since some of the TOCs are large, the requests are repeated hundreds of times for what looks like no good reason. This seems to be only partly remediable through cache control from the page. In at least some of these cases the browser is caching nothing. Since Internet Explorer 6.0 is markedly more prone to this problem than is Internet Explorer 7.0, I may yet be able to reproduce it on my intranet and debug it. Otherwise, I have no idea what to do about this: it’s not as if I can debug the live server and I certainly can’t justify debugging browsers other than Internet Explorer.