Brian Whitaker discovers an unlikely cause of bigotry

The Guardian, 16 July, 1998

I'VE BEEN feeling guilty for days and now I must confess. After weeks mastering HTML - and occasionally being mastered by it - I have finally given in to temptation.

I went to the shop and, with the sheepishness of a 16-year-old asking for condoms, bought Microsoft Front Page. At £129, it's quite a nifty bit of software if you ignore the preposterous ready-made design "themes" (Bill Gates's idea of what a Web page should look like - though I notice he doesn't use them atmsn.com).

Call it a sell-out if you like, but as my web pages become more complex I've been moving towards a grid structure with text divided into columns, and coloured panels that must be positioned accurately. That, inevitably, means coding lots of HTML tables.

Working with tables in raw HTML is simple enough in principle, but once you get to tables-within-tables-within-tables and cells spanning other cells, it's easy to lose track of your s and s. Front Page is a great help, though it has an annoying penchant for sending rogue cells flying off into the margins - usually just as you're about to finish a page.

I tried out Front Page by re-working the home page on my Yemen Gateway site and my only complaint - a minor one, really - is that the results have such mechanistic perfection. There are none of the endearing typographical quirks that you get with a hand-crafted Web page.

Last week, I complained about the BBC's hyperlink to the navigation frame on my Web site instead of to the home page. Now I know that it's all my fault. A reader says I brought it on myself by using frames - presumably in the same way that people who get robbed should be blamed for having something to steal. Certainly frames are a minority interest but they do exist - so why should sites like the BBC's pretend that they don't?

Some people's hostility towards frames has no bounds. If you find bigotry entertaining, do an Internet search for "frames suck" (what else?). Admittedly frames have some drawbacks, though since I started writing this column readers have suggested work-arounds for most of them. For example, each page on my site now has a link to the main menu, which - if you've entered via a deep link from another site - takes you straight to the frameset. Also, my links to other framed sites open a new window, eliminating the problem of frames within frames.

Used sensibly, frames do have some advantages. They mean that the navigation tools are always visible - especially useful when (as on my site) there are numerous long, scrolling articles. With frames, articles are easily copied or printed without having to include superfluous navigational junk.

Also, if a site has many files - 200 in the case of mine - frames avoid endless repetition of data and help, in a small way, to keep file sizes down (Yemen Gateway is a caring site and disapproves of profligacy with bandwidth).

Anyway, this column is taking a break for a while. I'm resigning, as the politicians say, in order to spend more time with my website. Thanks to all the readers who came forward with helpful suggestions - which you can still read athttp://www.al-bab.com/forum. And thanks, especially, to Nik Stehr for his Java version of my home page, which is displayed athttp://www.congreve.com/jjd/al-bab/al-bab.html.

So now I'm off for a long/hot/wet/cold (click as appropriate) summer at the web face. I hope to report later on the next stage of Yemen Gateway's development. Who knows, I might even re-design it without frames. Meanwhile, if anyone can recommend a simple but effective way to make the site searchable I would be delighted to hear about it.

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