_parent addressing (still Re: Extending URL syntax ...?)

Holger Wahlen (wahlen@ph-cip.Uni-Koeln.DE)
Wed, 30 Jul 1997 02:24:29 +0200

Date: Wed, 30 Jul 1997 02:24:29 +0200
Message-Id: <199707300024.AA02140@jupiter.ph-cip.Uni-Koeln.DE>
To: www-html@w3.org
Subject: _parent addressing (still Re: Extending URL syntax ...?)

I'm afraid there's yet another problem complicating the issue
of accessing frameset instances. <s> I haven't been concerned
much with frames until now, so I've just now used the 4.0
draft to make myself a bit more familiar with it; apologies
in case I only misunderstood something there.

Let's imagine I want to construct my page with an initial
frameset like this:

	| 1 |         2         |
	|                       |
	|                       |
	|           3           |
	|                       |
	|                       |

At the beginning frame 2 contains a wide logo, frame 3 a
welcome text ...

	<FRAMESET COLS="*,500">
		<FRAME SRC="getindex.html">
		<FRAME SRC="logo.gif">
	<FRAME SRC="welcome.html" NAME="main">

... and the file getindex.html in frame 1 basically only
consists of one link

<A HREF="menu.html" target="_parent">Display menu ...</A>

that loads a menu bar "into the immediate frameset parent" of
frame 1, which is - if I understand things correctly - the
combination of frames 1 and 2. Thus after clicking there the
screen looks like this:

	|        menu bar       |
	|                       |
	|                       |
	|          ...          |
	|                       |
	|                       |

Did I get that right? Now you might want to link to this
instance of the frameset, because you don't like my logo and
think your readers should have the menu bar at once anyway -
how do you do that? The ideas brought up for accessing
frameset instances so far have been based on some way of
telling the browser "start with that frameset, then load page
foo1 into frame bar1, foo2 into bar2, and so on"; even the
case of recursive framesets resulting from FRAMESET
definitions in different files could be covered with that.
But the frame in the upper part of the pictured screen
doesn't have any name, so how can you tell the browser where
the menu bar belongs?
