Dreamweaver - Frame Sizeing

Author

Frame Sizeing

Dan Needs Help!

2005-03-08, 6:42 pm

Hey can anyone out there tell me how I can do the following:

I have a number of pages that need to be updated on a regular basis and the
information is viewed on my site in more than one location. I am running on a
server that has not got any support apart from HTML. My idea was to use a
frameset within my main frame and link the pages I need to this frameset. OK
now heres the catch, as this is all well and good and the pages display within
the frameset they all have different heights causing every frame on the
frameset to have a scroll bar...

What I want to be able to do is have the frameset look at the height of the
page its pulling in and adjust its size to that page and not have any
scrollbars apart from one controlling the entire frameset.

any ideas??????

If this can't be done i am open to any ideas that will enable me to carry out
the task i am trying to do. If this is also possble using tables, that would
be even better. But I have yet to find a way of linking HTML pages into a
table cell. Again if this can be done please can someone tell me how.

Thanks in advance from a stressed out Dan!

darrel

2005-03-08, 6:43 pm

> any ideas??????

Don't bother. Web pages don't really have a 'height'. They can stretch as
needed to accomodate the content.

If you're strictly talking about images, then those have a height, and you
could get that height programttically, but your server doesn't appear to
support any back-end scripting languages (which, to say the least, is quite
odd). So, in that case, you'd have to use javascript.

> If this can't be done i am open to any ideas that will enable me to carry
out
> the task i am trying to do.

I'd redesign things so the height isn't an issue.

> If this is also possble using tables, that would
> be even better. But I have yet to find a way of linking HTML pages into a
> table cell.

Right. You can't do that. An HTML page is just that...a self contained page.
A frameset merely divides up the browser so it can load unique, individual
HTML pages in one browser viewport.

-Darrel

Dan Needs Help!

2005-03-08, 6:45 pm

Hi Darrel,

What do you suggest I do?

Will I just have to update the pages on 4 seperate instances. I don't really
want to get involved with any database stuff as I don't have the time to learn
how to do this.

darrel

2005-03-08, 6:46 pm

> What do you suggest I do?

If the issue is simply that you have to update CONTENT and that CONTENT
appears 4 times on the site, then you'll want to use server-side includes
for this. I can't imagine your server NOT supporting server side includes
(since that's usually a part of the server software itself) but you may want
to check on that.

Server side includes allow you to embed text into another file. It's sort of
like embedding a page into another, except the include is just a subset of a
page...it won't contain things like BODY or HEADER tags, etc.

-Darrel

darrel

2005-03-08, 11:19 pm

> Darrel, this is something i have looked into but it was at client-side
> includes. Is this something that would work as well if the server does
not
> support it?

Client-side includes require javascript to be running. As such, I don't
consider them, since much of what I do requires that sites be accessible.

Requiring javascript means things like google, screen readers, text
browsers, PDAs, and folks that simply don't run javascript can't see it.

Since server side includes do all of that, without the accessibility issue,
there is rarely a need for client-side ones.

It's really a lot easier to just find a server that supports these kinds of
things ;o)

> Do you have any examples?

Well, any example on the internet wouldn't show you much, since to the
end-user, server side includes aren't noticeable in any way (they just see
one HTML page).

But, to give you a code example, here's one:

yourpage.html
=================================
<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
Your header

Your footer
</body>
</html>
=================================

yourinclude.html
=================================
<p>This is the text of the article</p>
=================================

When the page is requested, the server takes 'yourinclude.html' and places
it in yourpage.html where you have the include file, and then sends it to
the browser as one complete file.

-Darrel