Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference

Name

BORDER — NN 3 IE 4 HTML n/a

Synopsis

BORDER=”pixelCount"

Optional

Frames display 3-D borders by default. The default thickness of that border varies with browser and operating system. You can adjust this thickness by assigning a different value to the BORDER attribute of the frameset. Only the outermost FRAMESET element of a system of nested framesets responds to the BORDER attribute setting.

Navigator 4 is consistent across Windows and Macintosh platforms by displaying a default border that is the same thickness as when the BORDER attribute is set to 5. For IE 4, the default value is 6 in Windows and 1 on the Mac (although the actual rendering is far more than one pixel wide). Any single setting you make for the BORDER attribute therefore does not look the same on all browsers. Moreover, at smaller settings, some browsers react strangely. IE 4 won’t display a border in Windows when the value is 2 or less; Navigator loses its 3-D effect when the value is 2 or less. Navigator also has a nasty habit of rendering an odd divot in the center of frame bars on the Macintosh.

This hodge-podge deployment of frame borders may make you shy away from using them altogether (set the BORDER attribute to 0). In some cases, however, borders provide reassuring visual contexts for frame content that requires a scrollbar. Having a scrollbar appear floating in a browser window might be disconcerting to some viewers.

That the HTML 4.0 specification does not include a BORDER attribute might lead one ...