Death to frames!

[Jools]

Well, the time has come.

I am looking at removing frames from the site entirely. This is a huge job but has a number of benefits.

a) Aligns us with w3c views of the online world
b) Improves accessibility
c) when searching you don't end up in a frame without the other frames present
d) will allow a standard header and footer on each page
e) the new header will be DHTML rather than the resource hogging Java applet nav bar
f) page load times will be faster
g) better tracking of pages accessed etc
h) the whole site will be php pages allowing for greater future techie advances
i) it's cooler

Further afield it will provide...

a) the ability to more easily migrate the database online and thus allow trusted authors to add to the database
b) indexing and upload of PDF articles
c) greater user interaction, rating of images, fancier user interface etc
d) upgrade of the forum software

The first stages will be fairly transparent, the new headers and footers will be "empty" and within the exisiting frames. Once all this is done I will then lose the frames in the cat-elog which is the biggest single task and will change the look and feel of the cat-elog. Finally I'll put in the new header and footer and lose the frames.

Comments welcome at all stages, but I guess you won't see much difference for a few weeks.

Jools

[Silurus]

Down with frames!

[Dinyar]

Yes! (I especially dislike that Java applet!)

Dinyar

[Jools]

Well, after two days work installing apache, php and a few other things to support the effort. I've got the first page up.

http://www.planetcatfish.com/about/author.php

The header (some text that will become the nav bar) and the footer (which boasts of the newly found XHTML compliance) are in evidence although I want to play around with the look and feel a bit before I go around more pages.

I'm going to concentrate on some pics and data content additions over the next few days.

Jools