My point is that your design isn't as capable as you try to present here. The palliative care site is a typical example of some of the frustrations I've had in the past with framed sites, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. The Tubularity site barely fits the left frame into the browser window, and that wouldn't be true if I had any of the browser add-ons that are so common now. Speaking from a user's point of view, viewing a graphic partially chopped off and not allowing me to scroll down to see if there's anything below is poor design (with browser add-on tool bars, this would be more pronounced). If you'd done that site without frames, this wouldn't have happened, and the "tradeoff" of not allowing a vertical scrollbar wouldn't have been an issue at all, since the right hand frame has one in my browser.
While the framed Tubularity sites I've seen have been some of the better ones I've seen with frames, they still only fit my usability wishes about the same as a low mediocre site without frames. When I get to the content of a page, that's all I'm interested in, and anything else is clutter.
Apart from the supposedly academic discussion about frames that most of this thread has covered (sounds more like a discussion on religion or politics, and the title of the thread asks for OPINIONS, too), the reason I almost never use frames (a few iframes at times to load pages with data from other sites) is that I grew to despise them back in the 90s when they were all the rage. The vast majority of the time they interfere with access to the main content of the page, pure and simple.
The MSDN library site I mentioned above is an example of this. I'm just as likely as not to copy and paste the text of one of those pages into a text editor so I can see more of it at once, move back and forth more easily in the real content of the page.
I'm no young whippersnapper, either, just a few years younger than you, CliveC, and not inclined any more in life to smile at BS and pretend it's chocolate candy just to be agreeable.
I remember when automobiles started using electronic fuel injection, and I'd enjoyed so much tinkering with carburetors on the cars I'd had. I still enjoy working with someone from time to time on an old car with a carburetor (and points), using little tricks I learned back in the "olden" days. But, except for nostalgia purposes, I wouldn't design an auto engine with one because the time period when that was the standard is past. As far as I'm concerned as a user, I'm glad frames are for the most part in the past.
Lee
