MS FrontPage —

Creating Inline Frames

Perhaps you've grown fond of the idea of guiding your visitors with the constant, reassuring presence of frames. Maybe you're already confidently envisioning one page, majestically sitting atop every page on your site, while the other pages below it scurry about, making brief appearances as they're summoned by link clicks. And then you snap out of it, alarmed at the thought of having to deal with so many different frames. If that sounds familiar, you may want to consider using a kind of pseudo-frame solution: inline frames.

An inline frame allows you to insert a frame within a regular Web page. Doing so is kind of like placing a window in your Web page that lets viewers see and scroll through the content of another pagethe one you place in the frame.

The biggest problem with inline frames is that, like regular frames, not all browsers support them. So be sure to create a No Frames page (Creating Frames and Framesets) for inline frames as well.

Adding an Inline Frame

You can add an inline frame to any Web page. To do so, place your cursor where you want the frame to appear and select Insert » Inline Frame. Select (or create) pages to appear in the frame, just as you would for any frame: click the Set Initial Page button to select an existing page, or click the New Page button to create a new one.

Modifying an Inline Frame

You can enlarge or reduce the size of your inline frame by selecting it, then dragging one of its small square handles until it appears just as you want it.

Use the Inline Frames Properties box to modify other inline frame settings (like your scroll bar preference or the alternate text for browsers that don't support frames). To open it, move your cursor over an edge of the frame. When your cursor turns into a regular white pointer, double-click. Or click once to select the frame, then right-click and select Inline Frame Properties. The choices in this dialog box work just like the ones you learned about earlier in this tutorial on Creating Frames and Framesets. One option you have here that you don't get in other Frame Properties dialog boxes is Alignment. Use this to set alignmentleft, right, or centerof the frame within your page. Other alignment choices let you line up the frame with a line of text just like you can do with a picture (as explained on Formatting Pictures).

Alternatives to Frames

Maintaining navigation bars and menus on your site often turns into a full-time job. That's why so many people were originally attracted to frames in the first place. But as their charm (the frames, not the people) wore off, Web designers started looking for other options. Fortunately, FrontPage has got you covered and is ready to help you out with two tools:

  • FrontPage Link Bars. Let FrontPage do your work. Link bars are site menus and navigation links that FrontPage creates and updates for you. As you'll see when you read more about site navigation in Building and Managing Web Sites (Creating a Site in Navigation View), you have to set up a navigation structure for link bars to function properly, but after that, FrontPage does all the work.

  • Included Content. This special feature lets you take content from one page and include it within another or many other pages. Because you edit this content only on its original page, included content is a great way to create one navigation menu that you can insert on many pages. Make a change once on the original page, and FrontPage automatically updates all other pages that "include" this menu content. Included Content shows you all the details.