Old <frameset> pages had its charm. You can still use it with HTML5! If I remember correctly was that screen readers sometimes had some difficulty handling a <frameset> page, especially if the were multiple <frame>s.
<iframe> is also great, but hard to layout horizontally. And resizing can be tricky.
And nowadays you don't even need your own event layer to talk between frames, you can use postMessage.
But yes, agree, continue evolve <iframe> and such to become more usable.
One can use postMessage but if everything lives on the same domain one can top.frames["left"] in stead of window and call functions or manipulate the dom.
You had me play with framesets for a bit.
document.write((function(){switch(window.name){
case "main": switch(location.search){
case "?foo": return `<base target="top"></head><body>Article text`;
default: return `no article selected`;
}
case "menu": switch(location.search){
case "?bar": return `<base target="main"></head><body>List of <a></a>'s`;
case "?youtube": return `<base target="main"></head><body><list of youtube.com/embed/ links`;
default: return `please make your selection on the left`;
}
case "left": return `<base target="menu"></head><body> list of <a href="?youtube"> links`;
default: return `
<frameset cols="15%,85%">
<frame name="left" src="index.html" />
<frameset rows="30%,70%">
<frame name="menu" src="index.html" />
<frame name="main" src="index.html" />
</frameset>
</frameset>`;
}})());
<iframe> is also great, but hard to layout horizontally. And resizing can be tricky.
And nowadays you don't even need your own event layer to talk between frames, you can use postMessage.
But yes, agree, continue evolve <iframe> and such to become more usable.