their favorites. [View full size image]   Yet another disadvantage when working with framed websites is printing. This issue stems from the same problem exposed by bookmarks in that, when you go to print a page, the browser has no idea what page within the frameset you are referring to. I've been guilty of choosing the File, Print option from the browser's menu bar. Ultimately, what prints out is a blank page that represents the frameset and not the intended page. To be sure of printing the document contained within a frame, you really need to open the document in a new browser window, away from the frameset, and print from there. From a developer's standpoint, you can add a Print This Page link that makes use of JavaScript code to print out the page. Finally, framed websites present problems for the visually impaired. Traditional screen readers lack the ability to decipher the frames in a frameset and end up locking a significant number of users out of the website unless a "noframes" alternative is made available (discussed later in the chapter). Modern screen readers such as JAWS are more sophisticated and can handle frames. However, you shouldn't assume that every visually impaired user makes use of a modern screen reader such as JAWS. Be Prepared In very rare instances, I have developed sites that employ the use of frames. Generally, the framed sites I create are small Help websites that, when opened, provide a help interface for the application or website being used. For the most part, I stay away from using frames. In my experience they're more trouble than they're worth. A larger site generally results in rogue links with bad targets that end up breaking the page structure. Even worse, large sites that use frames become unmanageable and difficult to maintain. Now that modern web authoring tools such as Dreamweaver use templates and library items (as discussed in Chapter 15, "Working with Templates," and Chapter 16, "Working with Library Items"), the main advantage of frames from an author's viewpointthat framed navigation aids are low-maintenancehas disappeared.             Working with Frames and Framesets Now that you have an idea about how frame-based websites work, and you're aware of the advantages and disadvantages of them, let's begin working with them in Dreamweaver. As you have done for the rest of the chapters in this book, you can work with the examples in this chapter by downloading the files from www.dreamweaverunleashed.com. You'll want to save the files for Chapter 8 in an easy-to-find location. I'll place mine in C:\Dorknozzle\Chapter08. Dreamweaver makes working with framed websites a snap. Initially, everything begins with the Frames panel. Available by choosing Window, Frame, the Frames panel, allows you to easily select and work with frames and framesets. As you might have noticed, the Frames panel looks fairly useless. It's not until you actually create a new frameset document that the panel comes alive. Let's do that now. Creating a New Website Using Prebuilt Framesets