Introduction to JavaScript

Introduction to JavaScript
Part 3

Many people asked me how JavaScript and frames work together. To use frames with JavaScript you got to have Netscape Navigator 2.0 at the moment. There are some other browsers which support frames by now- the PowerBrowser by Oracle for example. But this browser is still in beta and you can't run JavaScript scripts on it. First, I want to tell you a little bit about frames. Many documentations for HTML do not contain anything about frames because they are quite new. Using frames you can 'divide' your window which displays the HTML- pages into several parts. So you have some independent parts in your window. You can load different pages to the frames. A nice thing is that these frames can interact. That means they can exchange information between each other. For example you could create 2 frames. One with your normal HTML- page and one with a toolbar. The toolbar could contain buttons for navigating through your normal HTML- page. The toolbar will always be visible even when another HTML- page is loaded in the other frame. At first I want to show you what this will look like. Just push the button and look what frames are like. (If you look at this page online you have to wait some time when pushing at the buttons in this part of the tutorial because the scripts are loaded from the server)

Here is the HTML- script for frames:

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<title>Frames</title>
</HEAD>
    <FRAMESET ROWS="50%,50%"> 
    <FRAME SRC="frtest1.htm" name="fr1"> 
    <FRAME SRC="frtest2.htm" name="fr2"> 
  </FRAMESET> 
</HTML>

At first you tell the browser how many frames you want to have. This is defined in the <frameset...> tag. Writing rows to it the browser will divide the given space into rows. You can create different columns by using cols instead of rows. You can use several <frameset...> tags as well. Here is an example provided by Netscape:

<FRAMESET COLS="50%,50%"> 
  <FRAMESET ROWS="50%,50%"> 
    <FRAME SRC="cell.html"> 
    <FRAME SRC="cell.html"> 
  </FRAMESET> 
  <FRAMESET ROWS="33%,33%,33%"> 
    <FRAME SRC="cell.html"> 
    <FRAME SRC="cell.html"> 
    <FRAME SRC="cell.html"> 
  </FRAMESET> 
</FRAMESET>

This will create two columns and the second column is divided into 3 equal parts. The 50%,50% in the first <frameset> tag tells the browser how big the frames shall be.
You can give names to your frames. This is important for the use with JavaScript. In the first example above you can see how frames get their names. Using the <frame> tag you tell the browser which HTML- page to load.

I think the basic elements of frames are easy to understand. Now have a look at our next example:

This will show a window where you can click on some buttons in order to write some text to the other frame.
Here goes the source:

To create the frames you'll need (frames.htm):

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<title>Frames</title>
</HEAD>
    <FRAMESET ROWS="50%,50%"> 
    <FRAME SRC="frame1.htm" name="fr1" noresize> 
    <FRAME SRC="frame2.htm" name="fr2"> 
  </FRAMESET> 
</HTML>

Here is the source for frame1.htm:

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<script language="JavaScript">
<!-- Hiding
     function hi() {
       document.write("Hi!<br>");
     }
     function yo() {
       document.write("Yo!<br>");
     }
     function bla() {
       document.write("bla bla bla<br>");
     }
// -->
</script>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
This is our first frame!
</BODY>
</HTML>

And now frame2.htm:

<HTML>
<body>
This is our second frame!
<p>
<FORM NAME="buttonbar">
     <INPUT TYPE="button" VALUE="Hi" onClick="parent.fr1.hi()">
     <INPUT TYPE="button" VALUE="Yo" onClick="parent.fr1.yo()">
     <INPUT TYPE="button" VALUE="Bla" onCLick="parent.fr1.bla()">
</FORM>
</BODY>
</HTML>

Wow! These scripts get longer and longer! What is done here? The user loads the the first file (frames.htm). This creates the frames and loads the HTML- file frame1.htm to the first frame (named 'fr1') and frame2.htm to the second frame (called 'fr2'). This is plain HTML until here. As you can see the first script frame1.htm contains some JavaScript functions. But they are not called in the first script. Are these functions not needed at all? Am I just too lazy to delete the useless functions? Though I'm certainly the lazy type of guy these functions are needed in fact. They are called by the second script frame2.htm! We create some buttons in this second script like the way we did in the first part of this introduction. The onClick- property is familiar as well. But what does the parent.fr1... mean?

If you are familiar with objects then this is not new to you. As you have seen above the frame1.htm and frame2.htm are called by the file frames.htm. Frames.htm is called the parent of the other two frames. Consequently the two new frames are called child- frames of the frames.htm. You can see there is a kind of hierarchy which gives a certain interrelation between the different frames. I try to show this idea to you with the help of a small 'graphic' (ASCII- art would describe it much better...):

              frames.htm                parent
               /      \
              /        \
             /          \
  fr1(frame1.htm)     fr2(frame2.htm)   children

You can extend this concept of course. You can create some 'grandchildren' (if you want to call it like this- it is not the official expression!). It looks like this:

              frames.htm                parent
               /      \
              /        \
             /          \
  fr1(frame1.htm)     fr2(frame2.htm)   children
          /  \
         /    \
        /      \
    gchild1  gchild2                    'grandchildren'

If you want to index anything in the parent- frame from frame2.htm you just put parent before the function you call. Addressing the functions defined in frame1.htm from the parent- frame can be done by putting fr1 before the function- call. Why fr1? In your script for the parent- frame (frames.htm) you created the different frames and gave them different names. I chose fr1 for the first frame. The next step is easy. How is the first frame called if you want to address it from frame2.htm (which is kept in the second frame called fr2)? As you can see in my awesome graphic there is no direct connection between frame1.htm and frame2.htm. So you cannot call functions from frame2.htm defined in frame1.htm. You have to address it via the parent- frame. So the right index is parent.fr1. If you want to call the function hi() from frame2.htm you just write parent.fr1.hi(). This is what is done in the second script in the onClick- property.

Oh, by the way you see that I use <script language="JavaScript"> instead of <script language="LiveScript"> in the first two parts. There is no difference at all. But as JavaScript was implemented into the Netscape browser you could only use the expression LiveScript first. (This is an old scripting language from Netscape- JavaScript is quite similar). I thought as we are writing JavaScript functions here we should use the JavaScript expression. (There was quite a discussion in the 'JavaScript- society' about what LiveScript is. There were several opinions. This is my version...)

If you have created some frames and have got some links in one frame and someone takes a link the frames do not disappear. This is ok if the user stays on your page and you want to have a menubar. But if the user jumps to another page in the Internet your menubar might not be wanted anymore. So how can you delete the frames once created?

Just add TARGET="_top" to your <a href...> tag. This looks like this then:

<a href="goaway.html" TARGET="_top">if you don't want to stare at my page anymore</a>

Of course, you have to add TARGET="_top" to every link that leads 'outside'. If every link in your page leads 'outside' you can also write <base target="_top"> to the head of your HTML- page. This means that every link in the page erases the frames.

Index - Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7