Like to bring everyone's attention to our new Timetable interactive schedule. Lets you post events of at least regional interest in a place where interested persons can see them.

Also, planning to add other similarly interactive features (a links list, and possibly classified ads), and do some changes to the site layout. The Interchange will remain exactly as is (unless anybody has suggestions on how to improve it).

With regard to changing the site layout, does anybody out there still use a browser that doesn't support frames?

Railway Preservation News
hkading@rypn.org

Whatever frames are I probably don't like them. Should they be a problem for a 7 year old Mac?

Dave

irondave@bellsouth.net

Frames do sometimes force one to have to scroll sideways as well as the usual up-and-down. My only real objection is that most (if not all) frames sites I've been to cause you to stay at the same URL (the frames site URL) even when going to a link. If I try to bookmark the link, I really am just bookmarking the original frames site I came from, rather than the site I am actually trying to bookmark!

bilburns1313@ameritech.net

> Whatever frames are I probably don't like
> them. Should they be a problem for a 7 year
> old Mac?

> Dave

I only have but a few sites bookmarked that have "frames". Here is one, so you can see if it works on your Mac. Notice how when you scroll, the left side don't scroll? A hallmark of frames. Also, if you find a link on the site to go to, the URL at the browser adderss box stays the same. If you go to the link and bookmark it, you are really bookmarking the original frames site you thought you left! This is because (I am told) when you are sent to, say Amazon.com by the frames site, this lets Amazon.com know what site sent you. That site gets a credit from the site they link to, which don't affect your price - just your attempt to bookmark the linked site. Sorry I didn't have a railroad related site with frames to give you instead. Seems the only sites I have bookmarked with frames are rock music related.


A site with frames
bilburns1313@ameritech.net

Pretty much any browser released in the past five years or so supports frames (Netscape, Internet Explorer, Opera). However, when I first set up tmny.org about six years ago, non-frames browsers were still around, so I set up the web pages to work with frames or without. If your browser supports frames, you get frames. If not, you don't. You can also revert back to non-frames in Netscape by a right-click on the right-hand frame and then select "Open Frame in New Window" (other browsers have a similar means to do this) and you'll stay away from frames unless you end up back at index.html, which will switch you back into frames.

TMNY
info@tmny.org

> Whatever frames are I probably don't like
> them. Should they be a problem for a 7 year
> old Mac?

> Dave

Dave:

Can always count on you.

You can go to the RyPN home page and go to the link/button that says "Frames" below the intro to the monthly cover story. That will take you to the selection page where you can switch to the frames version of RyPN and see if it works.

Please let me know. If your Apple can't handle it we'll see about getting you a superheated computer, or maybe even a diesel.

Seriously, do let me know what happens. If a 7 year old Apple can handle it, I would think almost anything else can too. Actually, it's browser dependent, not computer dependent.

Frames. like most things in life, are a trade-off of advantages versus disadvantages. One advantage is all the pages don't have to have navigation buttons and you only have to download them once.

The part about not being able to bookmark is annoying, but I think there are ways around that, like maybe an exit frames button.


Railway Preservation News
hkading@rypn.org

Yeah, my Netscape Troglodite can handle frames but the size of the image is not much fun. That damn sideways scrolling is truly annoying - John Craft and I have had this discussion before too.

I would buy a bigger monitor but I am told I still couldn't see the whole page at once, it would be equally annoying just in larger scale.

My wife just retired a 386 PS2 with Microchannel Architecture (looks like ordinary office machine design to me). I might switch to and see if it works any better.

Dave

irondave@bellsouth.net

I've never had any complaints about my use of frames on parkengines.railfan.net, and I think it does make navigation of the site a lot easier than it used to be.

As for the problem of links to other sites not giving you the correct URL for the other site, that's because the site is appearing within a frame instead of its own browser window. Frames basically let your browser display several HTML files (that we would normally think of as pages) at once, and there's another HTML file that you don't see that defines the size and placement of each frame. The URL of the file that defines the frames is what appears in the address bar on your browser. When you follow a link that appears in one of the frames, the other site appears within that frame, and the file that defines the frames (and therefore the URL in the address bar) remains the same. However, there are ways to code hyperlinks in HTML so that the frames disappear when you follow the link, or so that the link opens up in a new browser window instead. In other words, it's not the frames that are the problem, it's that the site author didn't take the frames into account when they created the hyperlinks - unless they wanted the frames to stay there for whatever reason. If that happens and you want to add the site to your favorites, you can right-click (for PC users anyway, can't remember what the Mac equivalent is off the top of my head ) anywhere in that frame, except a picture or hyperlink, and pick "Add to Favorites" or "Add Bookmark" from the drop-down list that comes up.

Surviving Steam Photo Archive
rjenkins@railfan.net