Requiem for the HTML Frameset, 1996-2011

by Tobias Leingruber.

HTML, or Hyper Text Markup Language, is the basic code structure that create websites, and it consists of elements called tags. For example “

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” defines a new paragraph or “” will show a picture. As HTML is steadily improved by a committee, the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, and as the web prepares for a linguistic upgrade to HTML5, some features are destined for the dustbin.

Among the newly obsolete, few features are as hard to lose as the one known as “

”. Invented in the 1990s to allow web designers to mix-up several HTML pages, the frameset technology heavily influenced web design and net.art projects throughout that decade. (See the Motherboard TV episode about JODI, for instance.)

But despite its love by millions of amateurs and hot-linkers over the years, the frameset became a subject of serious fear by usability designers. This year, the HTML5 work-group decided to pull the plug and exclude the

from future specs. Let it rest in peace forever in quirks mode among its siblings, the and tag. (The frameset leaves behind one child, the