Website authors frequently make websites awkward to use, by ill-thought-out usages of frames; for instance:
 
    * Not all browsers support frames, even now.  Sometimes this is because the user has special needs, and must use specific browsing software.
    * Search engines aren't going to index a site properly, if they can't get past the frames to the real content.
    * It's difficult to bookmark a position within frames.
    * Frames are often fixed into positions which don't suit other browsers (e.g. the contents render at a different size, and get chopped off, or force you to view the contents through a keyhole sized window; worsened by authors who specify frames aren't to be resized).
    * Authors commonly put all of the navigational links into the frames, and the website can't be browsed without them (remember, a lot of visitors come from a search engine, directly to the desired page, and won't have the frame loaded; also realise that this doesn't mean that you should try and force them to load the frame, so get that stupid idea out of your head, straight away).
    * Some authors also do a stupid trick of using a frame to hide the location of the current page being displayed.  This is easily overcome, by expanding a frame to fill the complete window (many browsers support this), but causes problems for people who cannot use frames (they're stuck seeing an empty frame, not the right page).
    * It's common for authors to do a stupid browser test, wrongly declare the browser doesn't support frames, tell you to upgrade your browser, and block you from using the site.

Fundamental Problems with Frames
Part of the genius of Tim Berners-Lee's original design of the Web was a total unification of several concepts in a single idea, the page:
 
    * the user's view of the information on the screen
    * the unit of navigation (what you get when you click a link or activate a navigation action like a bookmark)
    * a textual address used to retrieve information over the net (the URL)
    * the storage of the information on the server and the author's editing unit (except if using embedded objects like image files which do require the author to manage multiple files for a page)  
 
The fundamental design of the Web is based on having the page as the atomic unit of information, and the notion of the page permeates all aspects of the Web. The simplicity of the original Web contributed to its ease of use and its rapid uptake.
 
Frames break the unified model of the Web and introduce a new way of looking at data that has not been well integrated into the other aspects of the Web. With frames, the user's view of information on the screen is now determined by a sequence of navigation actions rather than a single navigation action.
 
Navigation does not work with frames since the unit of navigation is different from the unit of view. If users create a bookmark in their browser they may not get the same view back when they follow the bookmark at a later date since the bookmark doesn't include a representation of the state of the frames on the page.
 
Even worse, URLs stop working: the addressing information shown at the top of the browser no longer constitutes a complete specification of the information shown in the window. If an author copies the URL in order to include it as a hypertext anchor in one of his or her own pages then that anchor will not lead readers to the desired view but to the initial state of the frameset. Similarly, if a user decides to send an email message to a friend with the recommendation to check out a page, then copying the URL from the browser will not work if frames are used since the URL points to the frameset and not to the current view (with the information of interest to the friend). Given that social filtering is one of the most powerful mechanisms for information discovery on the Internet, it is an utter disaster to disable the URL as an addressing mechanism.

Toutefois, certaines actions telles que le masquage (« cloaking »), les pages satellite (« doorway ») destinées aux moteurs de recherche et non aux utilisateurs et les pages ou les liens créés dans le seul but de tromper les moteurs de recherche peuvent entraîner le retrait permanent d'un site de notre index.