I'm inaugurating the Horizon Awards. If I were really serious, I'd come up with a list of categories, solicit nominations, and our band of bloggers would vote on them. That sounds like a lot of work, however, and runs the risk that my favorites might not win. So instead, I'm just going to announce the winners without informing anyone that there was a contest.
This award goes for the best use of frames on a website of substance. We're all familiar with frames, and probably place them second to popups as a hazard to site navigation and an all-around nuisance. So it's unusual to see a website in which frames are not only unobjectionable, but actually make the reader's job easier in a way that would be impossible without them.
The TEAMS Middle English Texts Online project has applied HTML frames to the end-of-book glossary and the footnote/endnote sections of traditional texts in a way that is an immense relief to anyone familiar with chrestomathies. They use the ability to redirect a frame to a different anchor from a hotlink on a different frame to allow the reader to look up annotations and vocabulary without ever leaving his position in the text. The result is an e-text that's actually more readable than the dead-tree version.
Don't just take my word for it, though — check out The Birth of Merlin, or — for the spiritually-minded — read The Cloud of Unknowing . Remember how many fingers you'd have to hold in different pages if you had a copy in your hands, and give thanks to the folks at TEAMS.
Posted by Ben Brumfield at March 10, 2006 08:29 PM