WebZonez
Long Journey
Some time ago, when the Frames fell out of grace, I started thinking about formulating a imaginative page layout technique that will offer great majority - if not all, the benefits of frames, without having to resort to frames, which finally led to the formulation of the ZoneZ technique. At that point, the idea appeared to be an exercise in futility, biggest challenge being to control the Default Scrollbars of browsers. Finally I came with an intuitive solution that worked. However, I had to either prove or disprove - beyond the shadow of a doubt, that this intuitive solution was the only possible solution.
So I started a series of experiments, which at the beginning, seemed to be somewhat lengthy but rather straightforward. However, I quickly realized that I had fallen into an abyss of frustration. After a series of what I term as my "Chasing-The-Tail Experiments", since I kept on chasing my tail due to interferences from other factors unrelated to the subject, along the way. As a result, I had to go back to square one many times, and try to identify, isolate these Unidentified Browser Obstacles and re-organize my experiments/studies, thus expanding the scope and time requirements.(as a spare time project, this part took slightly over 3 years!)
These three sets of in-depth and detailed experiments/studies, as documented in the section titled Screen Mysteries not only proved me right, but also produced a wealth of data, and uncovered some very disturbing Fundamental Flaws of Browsers. In addition we also came across some "skeleton in the closet": The existence of Phantom of Opera - a hidden element that appears to sit at the top of the hierarchy of elements in Opera 7.54 - even above the html element.
Having concluded the long journey and equipped with the wealth of data obtained from these, experiment, I returned to main objective: To clearly formulate the ZoneZ technique, which, at least in my opinion, represents a revolutionary new approach to web page lay-out. Actually, this portion was the easiest and fastest part, due to the fact that all Unidentified Browser Obstacles had already been identified and isolated.
Finally, we have a bold new and very flexible technique that offers all the benefits of frames, without any of the down-falls. The concepts behind the ZoneZ approach to web layout design, its implementation has been documented in detail, in the section titled Screen Revolution - ZoneZ.
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Web Design & Engineering: Dr. Z
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