I agree with most of what you say except for the idea that frames should be relegated to the garbage heap of history. Sure they were horribly misused and before browsers learned to make "back" work correctly in frames they were a nightmare. Frames still do two things that can not be accomplished as well with other browser features and which happen to be critical for the kind of modification of fullpage chat I am working on: tiling and transclusion.

I am a big fan of a combined tabbed-tiling approach, I use pekwm window manager and my desktop is a mixture of tabs, tiling, and restricted but occasional floating windows. Tiling provides the ability to have a large number of things available in a window while maintainng the ability to flexibly adjust the space alloted for each thing. CSS can do some things similar to tiling but until CSS matures, frames do tiling better.

As for transclusion: AJAX, the hero of ancient Greece and modern buzzwordists, can do translusion of *local* content but for security reasons can not transclude *remote* content which is critical for apps like fullpage chat and Zedulator. I tried making Zedulator using CSS and iFrames rather than frames and it was moderately successful, but nowhere near as easily maintaniable or usable as the frames version.

Take Zedulator for a spin and I think you'll see what it accomplishes with frames: Hide and display the private messages and other users as needed; split the main screen between chat and browsing or, when needed make the screen all chat or all browsing; drag a link from the chat to the search and see it appear in the browse area ...