Problem With Frames

I do webpage design, and I've been testing my final product with both NS and IE, to make sure people can see the pages no matter what browser they're using. However, I've been using my workhorse copy of NS 4.79 to check for Netscape compatibility. Recently someone called my attention to the fact that one of the pages I designed does not display properly in NS 6.x.

The page uses frames, but it's a very simple layout - vertical frame on the right with navigation buttons, horizontal frame across the top with the company logo, and then the main frame which displays whatever is selected with the nav buttons. It works just fine in IE 5, IE 6, NS 4.x, and Opera, but not in NS 6.x. All the client sees is the navigation frame.

Is this a problem with NS 6.x, or a problem with my HTML? My code is very simple - I will supply an example if necessary.

Thanks in advance...

 

Hi ace,

I'm not an experienced web author, so I'm only familiar with simple HTML. The following page includes the W3C.org recommendation for Frame tags:

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/present/frames.html

I hope this will help, and if not, please post back.

Ramona

 

My frames are all set up like the examples given. I tried tweaking a few things, and it didn't change anything - NS6.2 still only sees the content of one of the three frames.

I tried getting it to display the contents of the missing frames in a separate window, and that didn't work either. Those two frames contain tables, though, where the one that does display does not have tables. Is there something funky about how NS6.x handles tables?

TIA...

 

Could you post the link for the page in question? If I could get a visual, it would make it much easier.

Thanks,

Ramona

 

It's a commercial site

(Nothing terribly complicated there, really.)

 

I ran the page through the W3C Validator, and you may want to do the same:
http://validator.w3.org/

I only saw one frame with NS 6.2.2, on the left? If there is something funky about the way NS 6 handles tables, I haven't found it yet.

I removed the link, so you won't have to worry about it. Nice page, BTW.

Ramona

 

I added the lines required by the W3C Validator, but it didn't help. On the copy of NS 6.2 I have installed on another machine, I still only see the left-hand frame of the page.

I use tables as a simple way of positioning elements within a document, largely because it seemed to be the least browser-specific way to do it. That's why I'm wondering if NS 6.x is handling tables in some strange way. Even IE 6 has no problem with the pages I create, which I test in NS 4.79 as I go along. (Incidentally, I write the actual HTML in Notepad, because that's the way I first learned it.)

I've been over and over my frameset coding, and it all looks right... I really need to get to the bottom of this before my customers start to complain. Thanks in advance, again.

 

Ramona, thank you so much for the information you sent me via personal email! Thanks to you and your sources, the problem is now solved. It turned out to have nothing to do with tables - it was a syntax error in the page headings, copied from a (probably out of date) textbook. I'll let Ramona explain it herself...

Thanks again!

 

Having only basic HTML knowledge, I decided to post acelightning's problem on the netscape.public.dev.html Newsgroup. This was the outcome:

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This page is viewed perfectly in IE 5, IE 6, Opera, and Communicator 4.79. When viewed in Netscape 6.2.1, only the left frame is visible? Could someone take a look, and give me some input.

Thanks!
Ramona
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There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the frameset html file itself. However, both the main.htm and logo.htm files that are used in the two right frames have some bad code. The 'title' element in the 'Head' section of both pages is not closed. In the main.htm file it has '<title= "Main ">. It should be something like '<title>Main</title>. Since they are not closed, we can only guess that NS6x assumes that everything that follows is part of the title, and is not displayed.

Joe
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All's well that ends well.

Ramona

 

Thanks, Ramona, and I hope others may find this information useful as well.