Links and Targets in Frames

Now you have defined your site frames, the next step is to create links for their contents.

When a link is activated the default browser behaviour is to display the page in the current frame, i.e. the one that contained the link.

If you have defined a frame containing a menu for your site with the usual links, the various page contents will appear in place of your menu, not in the main frame.

To specify the frame which is to receive a page content, use the <A> tag's TARGET attribute with the destination frame name for value (the same one you will have assigned to the NAME attribute of the <FRAME> tag).

For instance, if you create the following link in the page menu.html:

<A HREF="mypage1.html" target="main">First page</A>

The file mypage1.html will show up in the main frame and the menu.html will still be visible in the left frame.

Besides receiving frame names, the TARGET attribute can also be assigned the following values:

• _blank, for a document to be opened in a new browser window.
  
  
• _self, for a document to be opened in the same frame as the link container; also the default value.
  
  
• _parent, for a document to be opened in the immediate frameset parent of the current frame.
  
  
• _top, for a document to be opened in the original full window; all the current frameset is cancelled.