Let's code something experimental... an introduction

If you can’t tell from my blog design, I’ve been on a bit of a retro website kick. I find them nostalgic and fun and I kind of miss the days where personal websites were a surprise to look at. A few weeks ago I was wasting some time browsing on Neocities when I came across an old-school framed website. A website that kept its structure, like navigation, in separate html files that were then loaded into the main page with frames. What a blast from the past. But that got me thinking, why did we move away from them?

Well, one frustrating search later and the consensus seems to be that:

1. You might navigate to the template? fragment? page, thus seeing an incomplete website.
2. Search engines wouldn’t search the content in frames, which impacted a sites SEO
3. Then the accessibility concerns, especially for screen readers, who can’t detect changes in one frame impacting another frame.

Okay, well then… what were the strengths? People used them for a reason after all.

1. Without modern tools or a back-end server, website creators had to copy the same structure over-and-over for every page of their website. So if they added a new navigation link… they needed to update every page that they had. Frames got rid of that. Define your navigation in one place and just link that in all your other files.
2. Frames reduce bandwidth and server load, because the same content does not need to be loaded every time.

Now that first strength stood out to me and itched at the back of my brain. Then came a blog post from Chris over at Go Make Things: Modern developer tooling is bad for developers, actually which is something I’ve been thinking about over the last few years. Along with how almost everything in web development is complicated, fragile, and inaccessible to the lay person.

So then I thought about frames again… and I opened a code editor and started playing around. I wanted to build something, that didn’t require build tools or other modern tooling, but still had that self-contained feel that Svelte and Web Components brought into my life, specifically that the css, js, and html are all in one place. I wanted no dependencies and something flexible enough that it could be a static website/blog, functional without JavaScript, or maybe even a basic web application (with some JavaScript).

I came up with something I kind of dig. It’s not polished and a little bit strange, but I’m going to share it anyway with a series of blog posts every few days. I’m calling it framed*.

1. Let’s code something experimental… an introduction (you are here)
2. An experimental take on the retro website frames.
3. A basic framed* website… more experiments with disappearing iframes
4. Coding a framed* productivity app - building out the calendar

A good idea? Maybe, maybe not. A fun one to scratch a coding itch? Yes!

Hope you enjoy 🤪