Frames on a Website

Posted by arlene

Imagine a private television station whose broadcast equipment was only four things: a TV set, a VCR, a camera, and a transmitter. What if the station’s programming consisted of pointing the camera at the TV set and tuning the set to the most popular programs, with the pirate station’s own commercials inserted in place of those of the channel being filmed? The pirate station could try to sell its advertising space on the basis of the top-rated programming it showed, and in fact might be able to demonstrate some audience figures to back up the claim. Nevertheless, this kind of retransmission of others’ off-air signals would violate copyright, trademark, and a whole host of other laws. Even if the pirate station never actually recorded the other station’s signals, rebroadcasting them live would not be tolerated.

A browser design decision by Netscape Communications Corp. has made an analogous process not only possible but popular within Web sites: the introduction of so-called frames. At their simplest, frames are windows within a browser window, established through special HTML commands, that can load content separately from the surrounding window. In other words, within a frame on a Web page there can be content from elsewhere within that site, or even entirely from another site, and links contained within the frame will cause new content to be loaded upon clicking. In many instances, frames are used quite creatively and usefully by Web sites. Some put navigation buttons along the side of the window, which link to different site sections within a large adjacent frame, or allow users to refer quickly to relevant information placed elsewhere without leaving the main site.

What happens, though, when a site builds the Web analog of the pirate television station described above, perhaps by designing a Web page which is almost entirely a frame except for a small advertising banner along the bottom? Because of the browser features, although the content may be that of the “framed” site, the address bar at the top of the screen identifies the “framing” (pirate) site; in addition, selecting the “Add Bookmark” or “Add Favorite Place” command from the pull-down menus will store a link not to the framed site but to the framing site. The pirate site may also be able to report user views on its advertising that are generated not by its own content, but from the framed site, which receives no compensation.

Unlike tracking file hijackers, discussed above, detecting unauthorized framing is much more difficult. Searching for a URL linking to your site is not always exact.

If you can find a site framing yours directly, and want to take action to stop it or at least to be compensated, what choices do you have? In one highly publicized case, news providers took both technical and legal approaches to prevent the framing of their sites by a Web site called Total- News. The TotalNews site had three frames: a menu bar of logos from approximately ten news Web sites (such as CNN and ABC News) along the left side, a banner ad from a Total- News advertiser at the bottom, and a main window in which the news sites would appear when their logos were clicked. The framed sites would appear in full, directly from their host servers, although the reduced size of the frame meant that a user often had to slide a scroll bar to see the entire page. A casual observer might have concluded, based upon the limited number of sites featured, that TotalNews had a business relationship with those site owners; however, a disclaimer three levels down within the TotalNews site indicated that no such relationship existed.

When the site was discovered, the debate among online businesses focused on whether the benefit gained, since the frames included all advertising for the linked-to sites, outweighed whatever revenue TotalNews gained from its advertisers. Some worried that, were TotalNews to be prohibited from operating with its framed interface, other sites might find even simple linking forbidden.

The news sites themselves, though, chose two routes to object to TotalNews’s activities. Many joined together to bring a lawsuit against TotalNews, claiming misappropriation of copyright and trademarks. This suit was ultimately settled when TotalNews agreed to stop framing the plaintiffs’ sites (although it continued to frame other, nonlitigating sites). At the same time, CNN addressed the technical innovation of the TotalNews frame with one of its own: it embedded code within its site’s HTML which, when loaded into a frame, would cause the framed site to fill the entire browser window, effectively breaking the frame. TotalNews remains in operation, combining framing and nonframing, while continuing to sell advertising banners.

One more important point about frames—although a site can choose to which sites it directly links within a frame, it is impossible to prevent users from clicking on links within the linked-to page to go to other sites or even search engines, which open up the entire Web. However, this secondary framing is not likely to result in legal liability. After all, if you don’t provide a direct link, it would be difficult to argue that you intended users to go to a specific site. On the other hand, though, it is entirely plausible that your site’s frame, with your company name on it, could end up framing content that was inappropriate, illegal, or simply not material for your company’s purposes. What happens if a child goes from a frame within your site to pornographic material, and a parent walks in to see your company’s logo surrounding the photos? Imagine, too, if a magazine or your competitor published a picture of a browser window with your site framing something inappropriate or embarrassing. Unfortunately, if you choose to implement frames within your Web site, the only way to prevent such occurrences is to ensure that there are no links to inappropriate sites or pages from any of the pages to which you link, or any of the pages to which those pages themselves link, and to keep checking that the linked-to pages haven’t changed to include outside links.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
Frames on a Website

• Professional Video Design and Presentation
• HTML Coding for different E-mail Reader Platforms
• Hot HTML: Stealing Others' Content for a Web Site
• Dynamic graphics on your Web site is paramount, keep in mind some technical visual design
• Direct Mail Headline
• Introduction to Web 2.0 Website Patterns
• Building Proper Links for your Website
• Web Site, how You Can Get Tip-Top Internet Ranking
• BadArticle.com Article Rewrite and HTML Markup Tool
• E-Building Blocks for Better Web Design