I know it is often said using FRAMES on a web page is a big no no. But it occured to me today as I was visiting a web site I frequent from time to time, that there is still a practical use for frames in a web site. Consider the following Christian musician web site. When you come to his page, it automatically begins playing his tunes, which you can listen to entirely interupted, as you browse the rest of the site. Such, I think is a great and practical use of frames, and just thought I’d share.
I visited the site. Great site. You can browse the rest of the site’s page without interrupting the music. And the music were all free for download in MP3 form.
As this thread is slightly controversial, I’m afraid I’m going to have to put forward a pessimistic/cynical argument, simply for discussion reasons. Please don’t take it as offense 
What’s the functionality of music on a site?
If I want to listen to music, I’ll put some Coldplay or U2 on RhythmBox and listen to my music. If I want to be surfing the web and music starts playing without my permission, that’s a pretty good reason to press ‘Back’, even if there’s an option to stop it. Telling me what to listen to is never going to work 
I don’t care if its soft music or heavy metal - either way, its not what I want.
It also means that if the average user were to navigate to a certain part and want to tell a friend about it, copying the page URL isn’t an option with Frames. What use is that for users?
Congratulations, frames and automatically playing music… fantastic way to inhibit usability and accessibility two times over, no-one should ever use automatically playing music, it is probably one of the biggest crimes of web design there is. All the studies I have read show that around 90% of people who encounter that kind of “functionality” will leave the website immediately, it’s basically noise pollution on a digital level.
For a musician’s/band’s website, it’s an interesting concept, especially if you could use the player to sample song clips and whatnot and still browse the site.
Should the music start playing automatically? Probably not. A better approach might be a balloon tip of some sort saying “play music”
A link to the music file achieves the same purpose of having the music continue to play as the person changes pages - and it gives them the choice of whether to play the music or not as well.
Or if you want some kind of protection against distribution you could embed a jukebox flash program like Last.FM uses to allow playing of media upon the visitor’s request, as long as the audio is invoked by the visitor and not started automatically, it is fine.
I agree, having the music play automatically is perhaps not the best practice in the world. But having some sort of embedded media player stuffed into a frame, so that the person can shuffle through the music at any given time isn’t a bad idea. It’s a much better alternative to having some pop-up window that will likely get blocked by a pop-up blocker. Yeah, the frame might make the site impossible to really bookmark, but such a site as this doesn’t really have enough content to drive users to bookmark one particular part of the site over that of another.
Actually a better option would be to use AJAX to dynamically load the content around the media player, at least that way it can be accessible, frames damage accessibility, usability and SEO all in a single shot, it’s pretty much UX suicide.
That’s not going to allow you to have uninterrupted play while browsing the site.
Why wouldn’t it? AJAX eliminates the need for the page to refresh, ergo the flash control holding the media file would be uninterrupted as the visitor browses around.
Frames playing music would play uninterrupted on my browsers. AJAX would not.
No, no and thrice no
:mad:
Never never embed anything in your website that plays sound without the user asking it to. It has huge accessibility implications (as does the use of frames) as well as being incredibly rude. If I want to listen to your music, I can do that. Give me a link, give me the option, but don’t assume that just because I’m visiting your website I want to listen to your music right now. I might have other music/radio/TV on. I might be sneaking a peek in the office on my lunch break. I might be on a crowded train. I might be on a mobile connection where I’m paying for the bandwidth. Let me enjoy your website in peace.
Why’s that?
One of the great things about the WWW is that every site can be different. While some vocal people find that infuriating, I think it’s great, even if some sites aren’t to my taste.
As much as I’d like to check out the page the OP linked to, the fact that I know music will start playing is stopping me. I suppose I could shut my speakers off before clicking. Hmmm.
EDIT: Ok, I clicked, but I don’t see any frames. 
Yes, that is a great idea to use frames for that purpose. However, it is not the best solution. Of course, the best solution does not apply to that site and frames is the way to go for least impact solution. If it was 100% AJAX solution or Flash then no need to use frames. Still, if I was in your shoes I would use frame as well. Not sure if I agree about auto playing the music though. Once AJAX solution site becomes common then frames will be dead
A popup window would also let you browse the site uninhibited and play music, and would not have the nasty SEO and usability side effects that frames have. That’s why they have been depreciated by the W3C and will not even be in the HTML5 spec.
From the W3C:
The following elements are not in HTML 5 because their usage affected usability and accessibility for the end user in a negative way:
- frame
- frameset
- noframes
Could somebody explain to me how AJAX would allow you to accomplish the same thing in frames? Perhaps I’ve misunderstood the abilities of AJAX?
Using frames, flash, AJAX and what have you seems like an attempt to force an ill-conceived idea on ones users, when there’s a much simpler and easier-to-implement solution. Why not create a page that only contains the music player, thus allowing the user to open the page in a new window if they prefer to continue browsing, or just open the player in the same window if they just want to listen to music.
Easy, accessible and works in every browser I can think of (can even be made to work with Lynx, with a small amount of extra work).