Frames are containers, not documents. From both an historical and a legal point of view it is important that a URL refer to a web document, complete in and of itself, rather than a container for web documents that may no longer exist.

Putting content and navigation in separate documents is the antithesis of what a web document should be. Unless the frameset document travels with the navigation document and the frameset and navigation documents travel with the content document, in the long term no one will have a complete picture of what was presented or why. In the short term, frames make it difficult for people to say where a document is by referring to an easily identifiable URL.

Frames must not be used on publicly available government websites.

Various techniques are used to lay these elements out for as an aid for visual users of mainstream browsers, such as placing the links on the left and the content on the right in a table. Similar consideration must be given users of screen readers and Braillers or users of browsers (on hand-held devices) that ignore tables so that the links and content are presented in a sensible order.