Digital media provides a far greater range of options for the organization and display of information than paper. Information pours across the Internet in fire hose quantities and into many different sizes of containers. Designers cannot make all information fit all containers but they can give the reader the tools to make their own adjustments. This requires skills that go beyond turning pages of a book. Techniques are needed to enable more efficient display, organization, comparison, sequencing and sharing of information. Frame page design plays an important role with these design issues. To view single web pages and sets of pages in framesets efficiently, a few basic skills are needed.
Maximizing or enlarging a display window may not be enough to reveal the entire width of the information available. To improve the view of the material of this online textbook, determine whether the display or monitor setting needs to be changed to show more of the page being displayed. By making the pixels of your screen smaller, more territory can be displayed. Changing this setting means finding the Control Panel for your computer, selecting the display or monitor option, finding the settings tab that shows the current screen size setting, and changing the setting to a larger pair of numbers, 1280x1040 or higher if possible to see more width. Change it to a lower number to increase the readability of characters. Not all computer systems have the highest capacity, so pick the highest pixel capacity that works best for the viewing needs of the moment.
Become comfortable in experimenting with different size monitor settings. The monitor resolution can be changed at any moment to improve the display as needed.
Frame page displays speed comparison and organization of information. They allows different web pages to appear in the same browser window. This is a powerful and useful design with some special user features that should be more widely known.
The frame boundaries in a frameset are often resizeable. Move the screen cursor along the edge between two frames, and if it turns into a double arrow, you can click and drag that edge to make more space appear on one or the other side of two frames.
A page can be popped out of a frame. A web page in any single frame cell of the web display can be popped out under user control and become a separate web page. Try it. On a Windows computer, right click on a link within the left frame column or the right frame and a list of commands appears. On a Mac computer, click and hold down the mouse button in the left column of links until the list of commands appears in a second or two. Select the command that open the frame in a new page. The web page embedded in that frame opens as a separate web page. Select the command that opens the frame in a new page. Either way, the web page embedded in that frame opens as a separate web page. The web page will not have a functioning back arrow, a further reminder that the page is to be closed when finished to show the originating page behind it. This "pop-out" procedure also makes it not only possible to accurately specify the printing of any particular web page where necessary or useful, but to see and/or bookmark the precise web page address of that page.
At other times a new window will form or pop open over the top of this assignment window automatically when a link is clicked. That is, as web page designer, instead of waiting for the reader to decide that for some uses a page in a frame cell will display better as a large independent page, the composer can force a page to not stay in the frame when a link is clicked and instead have it appear in a new page. If you finish studying and close the new window that popped open, the assignments window will still be there to remind you of any next course steps.
Beyond the design of the web pages themselves, your web browser has certain standard tools to aid in reading and navigation. The View command of most web browsers has a Text Size option, changing the the size of all the characters on a web page. The keyboard shortcut is Control Key with the + or - character to increase or decrease text size. The back arrow takes you back through all the links you have followed from a given Web window, one window at a time. The Go or History button in the menu bar at the top of the page will show all of these visited web pages for any given window at once, making it possible to skip a long set of Back arrow steps with one selection. This option is an often unknown or untaught feature of web browsers that should be more widely used.