htmliframetabsobject-tag

tabbed html application

I am writing a complex tab based web application where each tab is unrelated to each other in the sense that there is no interaction. So for ease of development i want I want each tab to be a separate html page viewable on its own and at later stage I can assemble them via tabs or may be menus or trees so question or questions are:

  1. I am planning to use iframes, does all major browser support them?
  2. Are iframes going to be deprecated, so what are alternatives e.g. is object tag supported by all major browsers?
  3. May be i can use some better strategy instead of iframe/object?

But what I love about iframes is that it can be totally modular, so each page doesn't know about other.

Note: i selected the answer which explain well but still i am not sure why not iframes question iframes vs ajax may answer that.

Solution

    1. Yes, all major desktop browsers support iframes. So do many mobile browsers, including IEMobile, Opera Mobile, and Safari on the iPhone. The only major browser I know of that doesn't support iframes is the BlackBerry Browser.

    2. The object tag is supported by most browsers, but the implementation is extremely inconsistent across the various browsers.

    3. What's wrong with just having a flat page with an ordinary navigation menu? If you are only displaying one page at a time, and the only interface element being placed outside of the iframe is a tab menu, then why not just integrate the tabs into the page layout and do away with the frames?

      Frames of any sort tend to break the familiar browser behaviors that people are used--like the forward and back navigation buttons. And they completely disable the use of bookmarks. When building a website, you should try not to restrict or dictate to visitors how they're allowed to browse your site. If the user wants to open a link a new tab, they should not be left without a navigation menu. If they make their browser window a particular size, the page content should fill that area, not a predetermined area specified by the dimensions of the iframe.

      Frames are inherently user-unfriendly, which, unsurprisingly, makes them search-engine-unfriendly; which is why so few professional websites use frames/iframes. Cheap broadband is widespread enough these days that reloading a few extra kilobytes of navigational data makes no difference to the overall user experience.