Ancient myths; Rant: Bring Back Frames! (on websites)

10:11 AM 1/16/11

I was recently looking at a website about ancient myths.

http://www.pantheon.org/areas/folklore/folklore/articles.html

(the main site is www.pantheon.org, if you can't figure that out)

I wanted to write about how myths are different from the stories and TV shows of today. I've complained a few times in my blog that there are very few 'concept' shows anymore, like The Twilight Zone used to be. A show would be based on some unanswered question or bizarre idea (something an enneagram Five might think of), which leads to strange or impossible things happening. Like, what if there were no gravity, or what if everyone on earth suddenly disappeared except you, that kind of thing. If you've ever watched The Twilight Zone (the old ones) you know what I mean. Questions about the laws of physics. Questions about people.

The old myths remind me of that. I can't remember all of the things that I read, but one of the myths was from the Polynesian area, Hawaii and those islands in the Pacific. It said that there was a bird that flies backwards. It can't see where it's going, but it likes to see where it's been. Right away I can see this as a 'concept' and it can be used as a metaphor to describe some people who aren't paying attention to the future and they're excessively concerned with dwelling on the past. Many of the myths were like that.

Then there's the idea of 'taking things to extremes.' There was a myth, I think a Celtic myth, about a dragon. Somebody threw a worm down into a well, where it grew big and climbed out of the well and started killing people. The dragon grew so long that it could wrap itself around the entire mountain three times. There was some other myth about an even longer dragon which could wrap itself all the way around the earth, and all of mankind was 'in its coils,' as in it wasn't just going around the earth in a straight line, it was coiled around all of humanity. (This is a myth translated from another language, but the murdering morons were pointing out to me that 'coils' refers to pubic hair, and I was being attacked after writing that sentence. It doesn't seem to matter to them that the original language wouldn't have used the word 'coils,' it would have used some other word, and we have no idea what the original word was or how it would have differed from the word 'coils.') And now they are saying that the whole thing is a phallic symbol, worms, and holes and wells and growing bigger and blah blah blah. They were the people who forced me to write this blog, so why would they act like I was the one who started it? It was their idea to talk about this.

(I am having a problem today because I have been posting on a forum, typologycentral.com, for the past couple days, and so I have been getting attacked by the murderers over things that I wrote in the forum. It's been a very long time since I used any online forums. This particular attack is because I wrote that I usually don't see 'sexual symbols' when people are using them. I had written that people are able to use sexual symbols secretly and I am completely oblivious to them and they go right over my head until somebody points out to me that they were talking about sex. So that is why this particular harassment attack is going on today.)

*****
Well, after using that website I noticed something which has nothing to do with mythology. I really, really want to start an internet movement to 'bring back frames.' It actually does connect with ancient mythology and old TV shows though because of the idea of bringing back something from a long time ago.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum21/8130-1-30.htm

(A quote from someone on that link: "...I had the flash of 'belonging' as I first saw a framed site - IT WORKED THE WAY I THOUGHT SITES SHOULD WORK.")

What are frames? Why are they not being used anymore? What was so great about them?

If you've ever seen really old web pages from when the internet first started, from when most people were on dialup, you would have seen frames. It's when the screen is divided into, say, two sections (although there can be more than two), and you can click a link on the one section, and the page will change in the other section. It's like having a remote control.

Nowadays, if you click a link on a web page, the ENTIRE PAGE DISAPPEARS and then you have to wait while the whole thing reloads. When you are on dialup, this takes a long time. It's annoying even when you're on cable. You sit there for several minutes looking at a blank page. (In the Opera browser you can set it so that you keep looking at the old unchanged page, but that's equally annoying.)

(The hacker problem that is affecting my browser is like this: I'm SUPPOSED to be able to display a partially loaded web page, with text and empty boxes that show that an image goes here, without the actual image in it. However, now that the browser is messed up, it takes like five minutes to show anything at all - it shows just a white, blank page - and it won't even show the text that I've gotten loaded so far (unless I push the button on Zone Alarm to cut off all access to the internet), and it won't show empty placeholders where the images should be. It just shows nothing. That wasn't happening when I first cleaned off my computer, but it started happening only a couple days after I got back on the net after cleaning off the computer, along with other various problems. This type of thing goes with the general harassment and computer problems. Usually whenever I talk about it or complain about it they get the bright idea to start attacking even more frequently and obviously. I usually don't complain about computer harassment anymore.)

Some web pages have tried to recreate frames that aren't frames. They've tried to do the same things frames could do, but without using frames. The results are usually annoying.

Why were frames bad? They had some problems which could have been fixable if somebody had designed a BROWSER that was able to deal with them. That's all they had to do. Just design a browser that can compensate for those problems frames had. If somebody had loved frames enough to be committed to using them no matter what, they would have designed a browser that would fix the problems, and we would still be using frames today, and none of these annoying web pages would be here. Maybe they just didn't know how bad things would become without frames.

(After reading that forum that I linked to up above, I saw that they think Google might not be finding pages with frames, or ranking them lower in search results.)

Frames were bad because... 1. If you tried to print a web page (and if you were using a wimpy browser that wasn't designed to handle these problems) then you would get unpredictable results. Sometimes it would print one section of the screen, but not the other sections. It wouldn't print the whole image that you saw in your browser. It might just print one frame. Sometimes it would print the wrong one, unless you knew what you were doing. It might print the box where you were using the 'remote control' section of the screen, when you were trying to print the 'actual content' section of the screen.

With frames, you click links in the remote control section, and the content appears in the other side of the screen, while the remote control stays still and doesn't disappear and reappear.

That was one problem. Another problem was 2. It was hard to find the URL of a frame. The WIMPY browser would display only one URL for the whole website, no matter which page you were viewing. The URL would just stay the same. You couldn't find the URL for a particular page so that you could put a link to it.

Sometimes, web designers fixed these problems by making a couple of links that would say 'bookmark this page,' 'link to this page,' 'print this page,' 'printer-friendly page,' and so on. That was usually because of the problems caused by BROWSERS that weren't able to compensate for frames. (I'm not going to say it was caused by frames. It was caused by browser designers who weren't committed to keeping frames no matter what, and doing everything in their power to make a browser that would be able to handle frames without the problems that the browsers usually had.)

(I am having a language problem caused by the attacks. They won't let me rephrase what I'm saying. I'm trying to say that FRAMES DO NOT CAUSE PROBLEMS. I'm trying to 'reframe,' so to speak, the entire idea, the whole concept. The 'problems caused by frames' do not exist and do not have to exist. It is caused by browsers not being designed to 'handle' (language barrier) them. They shouldn't have to 'handle' anything. They shouldn't have to 'compensate for' anything. Frames should be viewed as a normal, ordinary type of HTML instead of being viewed as a 'problematic' or 'difficult' type of HTML. They are just another ordinary thing. 'Dealing with' or 'handling them' is no different from 'dealing with,' 'handling,' or 'compensating for' ANY OTHER KIND of HTML rules and HTML behavior. I am having a language barrier problem and they won't allow me to use my brain to look for the right words to express this idea, and they are substituting words that give the wrong impression.)

So this ancient myths website was a site that used frames. And I was so happy to be using this website, to click on a link on one frame and see the other frame change without all my links disappearing and reappearing. And no weird fancy things like Flash. It was just plain old HTML. The website was there to provide ACTUAL CONTENT! Gasp!

Web designers have written about all the ways that 'frames were bad,' in many different places on the internet. They discourage you from using frames. But I want a different approach. Don't avoid using frames. Use them all the time, for everything. Use the old-fashioned kind, the bad ones. And then, DESIGN A BROWSER that will compensate for, or not have, the problems that frames cause in OTHER BROWSERS. This can only happen if somebody is committed to using frames all the time no matter what, and preserving them and continuing them because of their usefulness.

I love frames!