well when you define a frame, give it a name first, eg you have a frameset page:
<frameset cols="25,*">
<frame src="navbar.html"
name="navbar">
<frame src="home.html"
name="page">
</frameset>
So you use the name attribute to assign each frame a name.
Left frame navbar.html contains your navigation bar.
Right frame home.html will contain your pages.
Now say you're doing a link on navbar.html, write it like so:
<a href="news.html"
target="page">News[/url]
etc. the target attribute makes it load the link in whatever frame name is specified in the quotes.
If you want (but this really isn't a good idea) you can change the default, or "base" frame for links if you don't want to specify a target each time, by doing this in your frameset html page:
<base target="page">That would mean any links that don't have a target attribute saying otherwise, would get loaded into the frame named "page". Again this is really a bad idea.
There are some predefined targets as well that you can use in the quotes:
_self Loads page in the frame the link is in. This is the default if a <base target> tag was not used. (Use when you use a <base target> if you really want to load the link in "self"
_blank Opens this link in a new window. (Some browsers might try to reuse an existing window, if you want to be sure that it won't reuse a window use Javascript to pop up the page).
_parent Opens the page in the parent frameset in which the link is located. Only really useful if you have a frameset inside a frame. (yuck)
_top Opens the page, breaking out of any frames/framesets. (This is always a good idea when you're linking to a totally different, external site. That's my pet peeve on the web, is people with frames linking to external sites, but the site gets loaded in the frame). Could also be used to point to the frameset html file if you want to give users a link to break out of someone ELSE's frames.
_search Not widely supported I imagine (I think it's an IE only thing, I've never used it myself) but loads the link in the browser search sidebar.
And yes, lev did use frames on the DO site.
Good luck, ask if you have questions.