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Comment by jwells89 | Hacker News Reader

One usage of frames I recall was for sites that were meant to act as an index of other sites, where there’d be a sidebar on the left with links to various sites that opened on the right.

I think this was actually a pretty good use case for frames, especially back before browser tabs existed. It was nicer to run through a list of links in one window with frames than to jump back and forth through history or juggle multiple windows.

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I remember the arms race between these kind of framing sites (often increasingly scammy) and sites that did not want to be framed and had various anti-framing scripts.

This reminds me of “frame buster” JavaScript. It was a piece of JS that goes in the site to combat above mentioned behavior and “freed” your webpages from someone else’s content frame.

Is this the same as now right clicking on an iframe and selecting "Show This Frame Only"?

No -- the point of a frame-buster script is that it's a script included on a page to force that page out of a frame, it's not something the user runs deliberately.

I remember a search engine working like that, but I forget it's name. Dog something? It's ground breaking idea was, hey all these search engines kind of suck and you have to go to about 10 of them to find what you want - so what if you enter one search term on our page and we'll Iframe in the results from 10 different search engines!

I remember everyone at my university using it for quite a while, then google came out we were floored with the simplicity of it's home page (imagine what ten 1999 yahoo search competitor results crammed into one page looked like :D )

Dogpile

Dogpile?

Dogpile! That's it! Oh wow it even has it's own wikipedia page, and it's still online (albeit a very different site now).

Dogpile was the first search engine I ever used. My dad had a buddy who was into tech stuff, who showed us how to use it.

Later I learned about AskJeeves from a cousin who showed me how to download emulators and ROMs (this would have been in the mid-late 90s).

It's funny to think how much of my early tech experiences came from in person interactions. Dad's friend also built the first computer which I owned, which belonged to my grandma until she got a shinier Dell pre-built for a birthday.

I was allowed to "purchase" that machine for the price of two free mows (so $40). This was a steal by any metric. It became the foundation for basically all my computer learning into my preteen and teen years and the centerpiece of my bedroom. I have many fond memories of kicking back in my bedroom with ZSNES or bootleg Family Guy episodes.

Idk that I'd really connected until today how much of an influence that friend of my dad's had on my life, just through a few simple acts of thinking the net was cool and sharing with my family.

When I was young and still lesrning the basics I used it as a table of content for some long webpages that you could use to quickly jump from one anchor to another, or as a sitemap.

The big issue with this any really an use of frames is that you can't bookmark or share the state.

iframe can do that: just change the src attribute.

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