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- What is it?
- This is an Internet Explorer specific tag that departs from the
standard FRAME structure syntax. This IN-LINE framing method
(also called "floating frames") is basically a method to embed
other HTML documents within the framework of a regular HTML document
structure with the level of placement control allowed by the IMG tag. In
implementation and display it is created and treated much like the OBJECT
tag is - backwards compatibility is achieved by having the contents of the
tag ignored by browsers that understand IFRAME.
- Attributes
- Align
- 2
| 3 | 3.2
| IE3B2 | M
| N
- Required? No
- Description:
This specifies the alignment of text following the FRAME reference
relative to the FRAME on the screen. LEFT and RIGHT alignment specify
floating horizontal alignment of the frame in the browser window, and
subsequent text in the document will wrap around the frame. The other
values specify vertical alignment of text relative to the frame on
the same line.
- Values:
Left | Right |
Top | Middle |
Bottom
- FrameBorder
- 2
| 3 | 3.2
| IE3B2 | M
| N
- Required? No
- Description:
This attribute gives the author the option of whether or not to have
a border around the frame.
- Values:
1 [display border -
DEFAULT]
0 [display no border]
- Height
- 2
| 3 | 3.2
| IE3B2 | M
| N
- Required? No
- Description:
This attribute explicitly specifies the height of the frame in pixels.
It can be used to speed up display of the document being downloaded so
it can pre-render the document without the frame while the frame
downloads.
- Values: Positive integers
- HSpace
- 2
| 3 | 3.2
| IE3B2 | M
| N
- Required? No
- Description:
This attribute specifies the horizontal spacing around the frame in pixels
(left and right padding.)
- Values: Positive integers.
- MarginHeight
- 2
| 3 | 3.2
| IE3B2 | M
| N
- Required? No
- Description:
This attribute specifies the horizontal spacing INSIDE the frame in pixels
(left and right padding.)
- Values: Positive integers.
- MarginWidth
- 2
| 3 | 3.2
| IE3B2 | M
| N
- Required? No
- Description:
This attribute specifies the vertical spacing INSIDE the frame in pixels
(top and bottom padding.)
- Values: Positive integers.
- Name
- 2
| 3 | 3.2
| IE3B2 | M
| N
- Required? No
- Description:
The optional Name attribute indicates the symbolic name assigned to
the current frame for reference by the browser when other links target
the frame as a destination. Default behavior for all FRAME documents
is to be unnamed. Named frames can serve as a destination of links via the
TARGET attribute within the
A, AREA,
BASE, and FORM tags.
- Values: Alphanumeric characters.
- Scrolling
- 2
| 3 | 3.2
| IE3B2 | M
| N
- Required? No
- Description:
This attribute provides guidelines for displaying a scrollbar in the
frame for the user.
- Values:
Auto [DEFAULT
- Let the browser decide if a scrollbar is necessary.]
Yes [always provide a
scrollbar]
No [never provide scrollbar]
- Src
- 2
| 3.2
| IE3B2 | M
| N
- Required? Yes
- Description:
This attribute represents the URL of the current frame document. An
IFRAME tag with no SRC attribute will display a blank space where
the iframe would be.
- Values: Either an absolute or relative URL.
- VSpace
- 2
| 3 | 3.2
| IE3B2 | M
| N
- Required? No
- Description:
This attribute specifies the vertical spacing around the frame in pixels
(top and bottom padding.)
- Values: Positive integers.
- Width
- 2
| 3 | 3.2
| IE3B2 | M
| N
- Required? No
- Description:
This attribute explicitly specifies the width of the frame in pixels.
It can be used to speed up display of the document being downloaded
so it can pre-render the document without the frame while the frame
downloads.
- Values: Positive integers
Style Sheet Attributes
[More on Cascading Style Sheets]
- Class
- 2 | 3
| 3.2 | IE3B2
| M | N
- Required? No
- Description:
This represents an assigned semantic classification grouping(s) for the
current tag.
- Values:
Given as a comma separated list of alphanumeric characters. Class names
may contain spaces (multiple consecutive spaces treated as a single
space.)
- ID
- 2 | 3
| 3.2 | IE3B2
| M | N
- Required? No
- Description:
This assigns an alpha-numeric identifier that is unique
to this tag instance. Style sheets may use this attribute to reference
the current instance of this tag. Hyperlinks may also use this identifier
to serve as a destination.
- Values:
An alphanumeric string - initial character must be a letter followed
by alphabetic characters, digits, "-" or "."
characters. The allowable set of alpha-characters is restricted to the
A-Z and a-z set.
- Style
- 2 | 3
| 3.2 | IE3B2
| M | N
- Required? No
- Description:
This attribute is a text string that provides rendering style
information for the current tag.
- Values:
Please see the description of
inline styles for more
information on how to use this attribute and its
possible values.
- Example
- <html>
<head>
<title>Floating frames example</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>This
is a floating frame example</h1>
<hr>
<iframe SRC="http://www.foo.com/frame1.html" NAME="float1"
WIDTH="100" HEIGHT="100" ALIGN="right" NORESIZE>
You will not see this text if your browser supports
IFRAME. If you CAN see this, you are in a bad way.
</iframe>
<hr>
</body>
</html>
- Parent Model
-
%Anchors% |
%Virtual
Formatting% |
%Physical
Formatting% |
%Block Format
Parent% |
%Multimedia
Parent% |
<Body> |
<Address> |
<Basefont> |
<Heading> |
<Marquee>
- Content Model
- %Text% |
%Anchors% |
%Virtual Formatting% |
%Physical Formatting% |
%Line Break Content% |
%Multimedia Content% |
%Block Content% |
<address> |
<basefont> |
<Hx> |
<param>
Tips & Tricks
- Use of frames of any type can involve a costly amount of extra
downloads that a user could quickly tire of.
- Even though this tag is a great concept, Internet Explorer is the only
browser that supports this tag. The percentage of people who can view
pages with floating frame capability is still quite low.
- DTD NOTE: There seems to be a LOT
of confusion about what attributes this tag accepts. Microsoft's IE3
DTD as well its online HTML reference both list many attributes which
would apply more fittingly with the FRAME tag. Indeed, they do not
work with the IFRAME tag at all under direct experimentation.
- DTD NOTE: The Microsoft Internet
Explorer 3.0 DTD lists IFRAME as a replaced element (like the IMG
tag) but its online HTML reference lists it as a container tag. Under
direct experimentation it appears to be a container so I am treating
it behaviorally like the other major Multimedia container tag,
OBJECT. Like OBJECT, content of the IFRAME tag is only used to
allow for backward compatibility.
- There appears to be different default interior padding values controlled
by the MARGINHEIGHT and MARGINWIDTH attributes. In other words, if only
one of these attributes is specified, the default for the unspecified
attribute will be different than the default for the attribute when not
specifying BOTH attributes. [That looks confusing even to ME =)] It is
possible (though unverified) that the value used for one of these attributes
that is not specified is duplicated from the attribute that is.
Browser Peculiarities
- Internet Explorer briefly flirted with a syntax for floating frames
using extensions to the FRAME tag. This was changed to the IFRAME tag
in 3.0 Beta 2 to allow for backward compatibility for non-supporting
browsers. When the old syntax is encountered in versions 3.0 Beta 2 and
greater, Internet Explorer gives a warning message that the syntax has
changed.
- There is a tag attribute that Microsoft's references list for this
tag called BORDER. It does appear to have some effect, but it appears
to be to render padding around the frame (which is what the HSPACE and
VSPACE attributes accomplish) instead of rendering a distinct border
around the frame.
Boring Copyright Stuff...