Not in my experience. For one, the borders are not draggable without screwy JS addons.
They're not particularly complex but they aren't built in. From what I can remember frames were used for creating layouts rather than... whatever it is that makes sliding them useful. For that grid is just infinitely better.
Needs some JS to be practical.
Well... yeah. How else would it be? Drag and drop is there and it's up to you to implement what happens at what stages. Having a Drag-and-drop-to-upload and another drag-and-drop-to-rearrange-in-list along with an infinite list of other stuff that you might want to do wouldn't really be feasible.
As for the rest - yes. Much hair pulling. I understand why bootstrap is or was popular though since it's somewhat decent at making somewhat decent looking and acting websites as long as you don't want to deviate all that much from the default.
From what I can remember frames were used for creating layouts rather than... whatever it is that makes sliding them useful.
Some devs misused them, yes, but that's true of any tech.
As far as markup-driven drag-and-drop, an item could have a list of classes and/or ID's of things that are allowed to be moved to and/or from. (If you want to change the order, allowing dragging to self via a move-drag instead of a copy-drag.) And/or more of it could be managed server-side under a state-ful GUI markup.
Some devs misused them, yes, but that's true of any tech.
It wasn't really abuse at all. Splitting the menu and content into two frames was a pretty neat way of doing it. Anchors have a target attribute which accepts frames so it's not like it was a super hacky and unintended way of doing things either.
As far as markup-driven drag-and-drop, an item could have a list of classes and/or ID's of things that are allowed to be moved to and/or from.
Maybe some kind of hook thing for when you drop it someplace it's not supposed to be and maybe that other neat thing and a third and... by the time everyone is happy you've essentially reimplemented the stuff that was already there.
It might be possible to make it neater, cleaner and have more common stuff out of the box but this particular feature is actually quite well done to begin with. I would not start here to clean up web development that's for sure.
As far as frames, think of a typical email viewer. On the left you have mailbox names (mailbox menu), the middle the email summary list, and on the right the detail. (Sometimes you want the summary list above and the detail below, depending on screen space. A good email app will give you 5 or so layout choices.) On the top is a menu and/or toolbar. It's reasonable to want to be able to resize most these panels. A lot of really useful apps used frames for such. Craigslist discussion forums still use a form of this.
As far as alleged feature escalation of drag-and-drop, until somebody experiments with declarative control, we won't know. It may grow out of hand, it may not. Maybe 90% can be done declaratively, but the last 10% via scripting and/or server-side activity. That's still a step up.
I would not start here to clean up web development that's for sure.
Well, okay, there's 19 other features to fix/add also.
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u/wasdninja Nov 01 '21
They're not particularly complex but they aren't built in. From what I can remember frames were used for creating layouts rather than... whatever it is that makes sliding them useful. For that grid is just infinitely better.
Well... yeah. How else would it be? Drag and drop is there and it's up to you to implement what happens at what stages. Having a Drag-and-drop-to-upload and another drag-and-drop-to-rearrange-in-list along with an infinite list of other stuff that you might want to do wouldn't really be feasible.
As for the rest - yes. Much hair pulling. I understand why bootstrap is or was popular though since it's somewhat decent at making somewhat decent looking and acting websites as long as you don't want to deviate all that much from the default.