Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
format for combining and organizing web based documents together on a single webpage through the use of frames. Similarly to HTML Frames, XFrames can be made useful through its power to create a content frame that is scrollable while other frames - such as sidebar menus, the header and footer remain in place on the page. XFrames will be particularly useful to web developers who will be able to modify a single document and have that modification appear on all pages that contain the document within a frame.
The main advantage of this next generation of frames is that it overcomes several of the major usability problems existing in the traditional framing system.
Although still in the working draft stages, XFrames will be replacing traditional HTML Frames.
Differences from HTML Frames
Traditional HTML frames that were introduced with HTML 4.0 were useful for their ability to combine several distinct Web pages into a single webpage view. However, several problems arose from the implementation and as such, frames have been removed from the W3C XHTML
XHTML
XHTML is a family of XML markup languages that mirror or extend versions of the widely-used Hypertext Markup Language , the language in which web pages are written....
1.1 standard. XFrames will likely address some of the following problems existent in HTML frames:
a Web browser's back button failing to work intuitively
the failure to bookmark or favorite specific documents on the Web page easily as well as the inability to send an individual a reference to a specific document or collection
getting trapped in a frameset
the production of different results at times when a Web page containing frames is reloaded
the "Page Up" and "Page Down" keys being difficult to use due to the pointer focus being on another frame within the page
security vulnerabilities caused by the fact that a user has no way of knowing the original source of each framed document
Since frames are not supported by all agents, and the necessary content is not popularly implemented, agents that do not support frames (such as search engines) fail to render pages correctly and at the same time prevent any search engine optimization
Search engine optimization
Search engine optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid search results...
.
XFrames overcomes the bookmarking problem by encoding the population of the frames into the URI, thus making it possible to bookmark/add a favorite of a page successfully.
XFrames Implementation
Similar to other markup languages, XFrames will support a number of elements and respective attributes.
The following is a simple demonstration for the proposed implementation of a frames webpage:
Home Page
The element acts as the containing element of the collection of frames. This collection is what is being referred to as the 'frameset' of a webpage. Similarly to XHTML
XHTML
XHTML is a family of XML markup languages that mirror or extend versions of the widely-used Hypertext Markup Language , the language in which web pages are written....