It's been my experience that most big sites are getting completely away from frames on their sites. They reload the page when a request is made - you can see this at amazon.com, etc.

With that in mind, I created a recent project that is driven by data and loads content dynamically. The actual data pages are stored as text files on the drive. I did that so I could allow the owners of the site to update the content without having to give them access to the sql server.

All links, etc are defined in a table, and there is a pointer to the text file to load in the middle of the page. The owners of the site just create generic html and save it to the appropriate files.

The site was done in ASP.NET, but could be done in anything imo. If you have the ability to do asp, you could get the same result.

BTW, the site is - www.montgomeryacademy.org. If you go there... go to the Admissions "tab" across the top. You will see several "Links" on the left. These are built dynamically from a table - if you click one, the entire page is reloaded with the "link" you clicked (note the text of the hyperlink).

What we have is a generic template (TABLE) - with the top defined (actually it's in a separate file too and loaded dynamically), the left links and news built from a table on the fly, and the right content loaded dynamically. Each tab has a default tab to show - in this case, it's the first link with the word "Home" - like "Admissions Home". The pages just look for the tab you are on, and look for a link id. If there is none, the default one is loaded, if there is one, that page content is loaded.

Hope these ideas help.


>I'd like to design a page that will show samples of certain kinds of documents (i.e., paper forms). There are 30 or so types of forms, a handful of samples of each type, and a description and thumbnail image of each sample.
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>I'd like for this page to be data driven so it is easy to maintain. I'm thinking of a column showing document types, a second column showing the samples for the highlighted document type, and a third column showing the description and thumbnail for the highlighted sample.
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>The thing is, I want to avoid frames because of problems with bookmarking and printing. The Web Publishing Wizard (Tabular Hierarchical) is the right idea for two columns but it uses frames.
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>Is there another method or tool that I could use? Maybe listboxes? I'd prefer them over comboboxes. (Although neither will solve the bookmark problem). Can anyone point me to an example, an article, a tutorial, or a design tool that will help me? I've got a grand total of about 2 hours of Javascript under my belt and not a lot of time to learn it from the ground up right now.
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>Also, the Web Publishing Wizard requires the table to be converted to csv. Can I use a dbf with the description in a memo and the thumbnail in a general field?
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>Server is Unix. I'm using VFP8.
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>Thanks for any ideas or a quick run-down on my options.
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>-Bob