1.0 Background
A frame is a HTML element that allows you to include content from numerous sources in page. Normally a web page will contain text content, however, with a frame, the web page contains only references to pages that contain content.

While at first glance frames appear to be the best thing that ever happened to HTML, that may not be the case. There are two primary reasons. The first is that it is very difficult for the user to properly bookmark the page he wants to bookmark. The second is that it even harder for the user to print the page.

These two drawbacks aside, the frame is a very powerful object that allows us to make custom presentations easily

2.0 Privacy Implications of Frames
Because pages containing frames only contain pointers to pages that contain the page content, it is possible your content could be delivered from several different websites.

You may assume that would be no big deal, but there are methods to talk in between frames on any given page. It is javascript. However, in the case of pages from different sites, the browser will block information exchange between frames.

3.0 P3P Implications of Frames
Programming methods will normally overcome all of the problems associated with using frames with a P3P privacy policy. However, there could be problems if the frames are set up in a certain manner.

In some cases you may have multiple web site domains and you want to use content from two or more domains, you may use a frame to do this. Then your main page would contain frames that are pointers to the other domains that contain content. Herein lies the problem.

Because the page containing the frames is on one domain and the content in the frames is from another domain, your P3P policy would not work how you think it should. The reason is that the privacy policy linked to the main page does not link to the content pages.

This obstacle can be overcome by proper programming of the frames.

Other programming issues are discussed in Web Site Design.