Posted by eric.olstad on 08/30/06 15:11

I just thought I'd post this for any that care. I'm sure it has been
explained before.


This topic deals with the differences in framesets between IE (Internet
Explorer) and Firefox.

Why framesets?
Well they may be a pain to program with, but they provide a nice
interface.

I recently spend a handful of minutes trying to determine the
differences between how IE handles framesets versus how Firefox does.

Framesets have a few non-standard properties that are relevant here.

frameborder
framespacing
border
bordercolor

These attributes are not documented on W3C, but firefox and IE both
understand them.

frameborder
This attribute tells the browser to render a border on the frames or
not. It can have a value of 0 or 1. 0 = hide borders, 1 = show
borders

framespacing
This attribute is only understood by IE. It tells the browser how wide
to render the borders. A wider border is easier to grab if the frames
allow resize.

border
This attribute is understood by IE and Firefox. However, IE will
override this value if the framespacing value is present.

bordercolor
This attribute tells the browser to render the borders with the given
color.

Then, on top of that IE actually renders the borders a few pixels wider
than Firefox. So a border="5" will render at around 7 or 8 on IE and 5
on Firefox. We can actually use these incompatibilities to our
advantage. Take the following HTML:

<frameset rows="80px,*" frameborder="1" framespacing="3" border="5"
bordercolor="#C00000">
<frame noresize="noresize" bordercolor="#C00000" />
<frameset cols="100px, *">
<frame />
<frame />
</frameset>
</frameset>

This will render borders of equal sizes on both browsers. Also, it is
important to note that though these attributes are properties of the
frame element, the browsers recognize them fine on the frameset
element. Any frames or framesets child to a frameset inherit its
properties. So adding these attributes to the root frameset
effectively gives us the options we want.

Go here to test this:
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tryit.asp?filename=tryhtml_frame_cols

Hope this helped someone...

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