My contrarian take for the day: I liked frames. It was a nice built-in way to provide consistent site-level navigation and context when your styling options were otherwise pretty limited. The only problem was when it broke navigation outside the site, which was a pretty bad design decision and took a lot of self-discipline to prevent.

The second “website” I built was a GTA fan site in about 1998-99 (I was about 13), I had just discovered frames and decided they were brilliant. The layout was a header, left side nav, main content and footer - all frames. But the look I was going for had a black ~4px border around each frame. Rather than do this with tables inside the frames I created a ‘black.html’ page with a back background and added it I think about 10 times to the frameset to create the borders. It’s was in my mind at the time beautiful.

It’s archived on archive.org - I forget the url….

Still feels like the wild west, just in a different way

I was so happy to no longer need frames. Modern CSS with grid and flex have made <frame> feel like a horrible nightmare that I just can't quite shake. One that makes you turn on the lights in every room.

Made me remember the International I hate Frames Club:

http://budugllydesign.com/frame9806/hateframe.html

There was no async in those days, we exchanged data through hidden iframes, just dont close the page because progress was gone.