Iframe Explanation:

Iframes or inline frames are important in web development terms. They differ from framesets in that they are not separate windows as such but rather are rendered in the same window, hence the term inline. It may surprise you to learn that I am using iframes here and these were created with my Nirvana extension suit.

Iframes are supported by Internet Explorer 4.0+ and Netscape 6. Netscape 4 does not support Iframes.

They are important to learn because they form the basis of external loading techniques. Aside from that sometimes Iframes are preferable to framesets particularly if you want to load content into a confined area.

Note that for Netscape 6 the name of the iframe must also be specified due to a bug in its implementation. However the correct identification of an Iframe is performed through the id attribute as shown below.

<iframe src="dummy.htm" name="contentFRM" id="contentFRM" scroll="no" width="600" height="1500" marginwidth="1" marginheight="1" frameborder="0" align="default">
</iframe>

Each attribute in the Iframe tag has different options. Click on the attributes link to see what each of these attributes does.

The script to load an iframe is as lean as it gets, just stick this in the head section of the document:

<script language="JavaScript">
<!--
function loadIframe(theURL) {
document.getElementById("contentFRM").src = theURL;
}
//-->
</script>

To call it from an event handler use this:

<a href="#" onClick="loadIframe('explain.htm')">