About frames and framesets
On the Web, frames are used to display more than one document in the same browser window. Each frame in a frameset displays a different document (or different parts of the same document). Frames act almost like independent windows: they can be scrolled independently of other frames, and the document appearing in one frame can change without affecting other frames.
A typical use of frames is to display a set of links together with the destination of one of those links. Clicking a link in the links frame loads its destination in the content frame. Since frames scroll independently, a viewer can scroll the content frame while the links in the links frame stay in place. Additional frames might be used, for example, to display a banner that always stays at the top of the window and a footer that always stays at the bottom of the window.
A frameset with banner, links, and content frames
Each frame in a frameset must have an initial document—the document that appears in the frame when the frameset is first opened in a browser. A frame’s initial document may later be replaced by another document in the course of browsing the site. In the example above, the initial document of the content frame will be replaced by another document when the user clicks a link in the links frame. An initial document does not need to be located on your site; it can be any document on the Web.
To open a frameset in a browser, you open the frameset document—this is the document that contains the information the browser needs to display the frames and fill them with content from other sources. The frameset document itself normally does not appear in the browser window, although its URL appears in the browser’s address bar. However, if a browser does not support frames, then it will display the contents of a <noframes> element in the frameset document.
To link to a frameset, use the URL of the frameset document. Similarly, to use a frameset as the default document for a site, specify the file name of the frameset document in your Web server’s default document setting (or rename the frameset document to index.html).