On a web page, framing means that a website can be organized into HTML element#Frames. Each frame displays a different HTML document. This practice is useful for making headers and sidebar menus that do not move when the content frame is scrolled up and down. It also significantly decreases the hassle of maintaining a website. For example, if an item needs to be added to the sidebar menu, only one file needs to be changed, whereas each individual page on a non-frameset website would have to be edited if the sidebar menu appeared on all of them.

The contents of the frames may be hosted on the same script in its pages. The framing website runs a risk of being blamed for external content that e.g. is or becomes inaccurate or objectionable. [http://www.aardvark.co.nz/linking.htm]

Although frames were included in the XHTML 1.0 specification, they were not carried across to XHTML 1.1. The intended eventual replacement is XFrames ([http://www.w3.org/TR/xframes/ XFrames]), which attempts to solve the problem of addressing a populated frameset through composite URIs.

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