The W3C published a new working draft of their XFrames specification today, an XML application designed to replace HTML Frames.

XFrames solves most usability problems known from HTML Frames (Back button, bookmarking, page reloads, search engine woes, etc) by introducing a new URI reference notation:

http://example.org/home.xframes#frames(id1=uri1,id2=uri2,...)

In addition to vertically and horizontally tiled frames, XFrames introduces two new composition modes “single” (one frame visible at a time, navigation through tabs, for example) and “free” (movable, overlapping windows), making it an extremely simple but powerful tool for web application development.

DENG 1.0 already features an experimental XFrames implementation, and even better support for the latest spec is one of the priorities for DENG 2.0.