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Source. The specimen is nick.com, Wayback capture 11 November 1998, quoted whole and unedited. The amateur frameset is geocities.com/TimesSquare/1183, read via the oocities mirror, with its duplicate frame name, missing space, unclosed tag and swapped comments left exactly as found. Both Netscape quotations are from home.netscape.com/assist/net_sites/, captures dated 15 April 1997: the no-body rule from frame_syntax.html, the individual-URL pitch from frames.html. Netscape's own recursion guard, which treats a frame whose SRC matches any ancestor as having no SRC at all, is in frame_implement.html. The live 2026 frameset and its noframes line are from purplehello98.neocities.org. All in reference/4-construction/frameset/.

The repair kit is real code by someone who wanted to keep framesets. Melo-tech Frame Link Management System 3.2.1, melonking.net/scripts/frame-link.js, whose header says Feel free to steal this code!, the only explicit license anywhere in this folder. It writes the inner page into a query parameter with history.replaceState so the URL can be shared, listens for popstate to re-point the frame, and scrubs javascript: out of the parameter, because deep linking into a frame by URL reintroduces an injection surface. Read carefully: it uses replaceState, not pushState, so it makes the address shareable and does not by itself restore the back button. The button on this page does the same two things and reports the same limit.

What is real here and what is not. The simulator above is ordinary page elements: not frames, not iframes, and not a browser. The address bar in it is a styled span, which is the only way to show a URL that visibly refuses to change. It is labeled as a drawing on the page rather than implied to be more. The frameset at /frameset-demo/ is genuine, written for this plate, with a nested <frameset> matching the nick.com shape. Its ad pane is a description of what loaded there in 1998, not an ad and not a third-party request.

Deliberately absent. When frames were introduced, which version of Netscape shipped them, when the W3C deprecated them, and any claim about how common they were: none of that is in these captures, so none of it is stated. frameborder, framespacing and marginwidth are non-standard presentational attributes that browsers still honor for legacy content, and are not presented here as spec.

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