replacement for frames? why not to use?

[office politics]

our company uses many different vendors websites. we'd like to create a that shows links to all vendors' websites at the top or side and then display the vendors website below or to the side. I'm certain we could do this using the frames tag, but previous reading says we should avoid it. Anyone know why? Is there any other way to solve this problem? We cannot change the vendor's websites.

edit - a couple links i found. they say search engines don't search properly. this doen't matter in my case. Navigation could be harder for the user. Some browsers are incompatible (but does say which ones).

http://www.rainbodesign.com/pub/nfNavMenu/replace-frames.html

http://www.webquarry.com/~raditha/web/frames/whynot.html

http://www.ex-designz.net/articleread.asp?aid=130



edit2- better read on why not to use frames

http://www.htmlhelp.com/design/frames/whatswrong.html

 

[CrazeD]

Guess I'm not following what you want to do. Why do you need to use frames to put links on your page?

 

[office politics]

to have a collection of links always appear in a top frame and still allow the visitor to visit many different vendor sites in the bottom frame. This way its less clicks to get to different vendor sites.

 

[CrazeD]

I see. Sounds like a fair use of frames.

I'd rather use iframes though.

 

[zedman3d]

I see. Sounds like a fair use of frames.

I'd rather use iframes though.

There is no alternative to iframes is there for showing external pages?

 

[CrazeD]

There is no alternative to iframes is there for showing external pages?

You could use object's instead. But I've never tried it and I hear it's tricky.

Otherwise you'd need a server-side language to help.

EDIT: And in this case, frames are actually being used the way they are supposed to. It can't really be helped, there's not really a better way to do it.