II Something
by Clark Hugh Stiles
January 23, 2002 

Listing 3 in the previous issue was the main page of a FRAMEd site. Typically the homepage you're offered by your ISP, or by one of the freebie sites if your ISP is run by a bunch of cheap bastards, is titled "index.htm" or "index.html". On GeoCities the default page is "index.html", so that if you type "www.geocities.com/clarkhughstiles/" into the goto box of your browser, you'll wind up at "www.geocities.com/clarkhughstiles/index.html" (or you could select the link you just passed). 

The secret to making the three box frame setup is that FRAMEs can be nested. If you do it wrong the browser will load a blank window, possibly viewable using "view source" or its equivalent. I've done FRAMEs wrong plenty of times by the way, which is the main reason it's taken me years to write this and to convert my website. In other words, it was mostly sour grapes and stupidity that delayed my conversion. 

Listing 1: 
<html>
<head>
<title>My Apple II Site</title>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
</head>
<body bgcolor="white" text="black" alink="black"
link="black" vlink="black"
background="backgrounds/bg.jpg" bgproperties=fixed>
<center>
<h1>
<a href="index.html">My Apple II Site</a>
</h1>
</center>
</body>
</html> 
End of Listing. 

This uses some easy to understand techniques to format text. The title of the site is "My Apple II Site", and the only content of the page is "My Apple II Site". The text is set to H1 (largest size) and CENTERed. It's also enclosed in a link, so that if someone surfs into that page, they'll see a link to load your default page, and thus set themselves back into the fine set of frames you're using. The alternative is, they see your title header and don't know what to do. This problem can happen if all of your pages wind up in the search engines. Noticed the tag in line four of the listing I hope: 
META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW" 
That tells most search engine robotic "webcrawlers" to ignore the page and not include it in their indices. They'll thank you and so will your visitors. Or better yet, your visitors will never notice. DO NOT include that code in any page you want indexed, or you'll remain mystified that your excellent website hasn't made it into the search engines. 

Speaking of META tags, those are important ways to tell the search engines what's on the page and how to classify it. A couple of issues back there was a link to a comprehensive listing of META tags, but I'll eventually show you the two important ones. 

The rest of the BODY tag should be obvious, but I didn't explain it last time, so here goes. BGCOLOR is the background color of the window, and if you're using a BACKGROUND= statement to load an image, select a BGCOLOR that complements the image. It's merely a stylistic choice, but I feel it's an important one. Background images (images of all kinds) load pretty quickily in this age of 56K modems (I started out on a 300 baud, which had backward compatible with 110 baud, oh boy, don't want to do without that) and never used higher than 14.4 on the GS. Broadband users (that's what typically found in libraries) don't feel the pain of waiting for most images to load (depending on the server where the image resides). But going from white to something else will be noticed no matter what, so selecting "white" as the color may not be the best choice. 

Using no background image is always a choice. I just read that printers discovered long ago that mostly they should use white paper, black ink, and the only other color ink they'd use (for accents) is red. Those of us old enough to remember the typewriter probably remember those split black-red ribbons that came with many of them. That's the reason. 

The TEXT= parameter specifies the text color. Default is black. ALINK, LINK, and VLINK specifies the color to be used for various links (VLINK means visited link). That way you can specify how you want links to look under various circumstances. I can't remember what the defaults are for those. I used black for these, but you could make them red (guess why), or select two shades of a color so that recently visited links look "faded". That helps the visitor navigate. It's better to have content that is so great they never want to leave. [joke] 

Check out the Paul McFedries website for a couple of useful pages showing the "legal" color names and the like. 

Listing 2: 
<html>
<head>
<title>Hello World site</title>
<meta name="description" content="Apple II">
<meta name="keywords" content="Apple II, Infinitum">
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
</head>
<frameset cols="196,*" border="NO"
frameborder="0" framespacing="0">
<frame src="contents.html" marginwidth="0"
marginheight="0" name="ListWin">
<frame src="welcome.html" marginwidth="0"
marginheight="0" name="MsgWin">
</frameset>
<noframes>
<body bgcolor="white" text="black"
alink="black" link="black" vlink="black"
background="backgrounds/bg.jpg" bgproperties=fixed>
<h1>
<a href="index.html">My Apple II Site</a>
</h1>
</body>
</noframes>
</html> 
End of Listing. 

Okay, now you see it. The "lower.html" file has a link inside it, but it's probably never seen because it's in a "no robots" page inside the NOFRAMES tags. In case anyone winds up there without a frames enabled browser, they'll have some way home. That's probably the last time you'll have to worry about that particular problem, but all of the pages on a FRAMEd site should have that link. That way there's always a way back to the default page, even if you wind up discontinuing the FRAME scheme you're using. And in the meantime, there's no upkeep on the no doubt hundreds of pages you'll soon have. 

Browsers without a multiwindow or FRAME capability will also be 100 per cent compatible with your site. And all you'll have to maintain is the "menu.html" page (below) and the identical set of links pasted into the NOFRAMES section of your "index.html". Believe me, it's a LOT easier to maintain than other systems. 

If you don't have FRAMEs and are not interested in them, having that return to home link on every page is a no muss fuss or bother method of keeping visitors from getting lost. They can go back to your menu whenever they want, and if you change your mi ...[Message truncated]  

