[whatwg] overflow of seamless iframes

Mon Aug 18 16:48:49 PDT 2008

It's not clear to me why "iframe { overflow: visible; }" won't do anything.

I've been involved in some web applications where the client uses iframes to
open different external applications in the main one and wanted it to grow
vertically so it doesn't have a vertical scroll.

Is there another way to achieve this without setting a fixed height and
without using javascript?

--
Samuel Santos
http://www.samaxes.com/

On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 9:53 AM, Robert O'Callahan <robert at ocallahan.org>wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 6:45 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 18 Aug 2008, Robert O'Callahan wrote:
>> > On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 4:40 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
>> > > On Mon, 18 Aug 2008, Robert O'Callahan wrote:
>> > > > > Note that the default width and height are adjusted for seamless
>> > > > > iframes to match the width that the element would have if it was a
>> > > > > non-replaced block-level element with 'width: auto', and the
>> > > > > height of the bounding box around the content rendered in the
>> > > > > iframe at its current width, respectively.
>> > > >
>> > > > "The bounding box" is a bit ambiguous. If the content overflows
>> > > > vertically above the iframe's viewport, does that contribute to the
>> > > > height of the bounding box?
>> > >
>> > > As far as I can tell there is no ambiguity to the concept of the
>> > > bounding box of the content in the canvas, especially given the way
>> > > the initial containing block is forced to zero height.
>> >
>> > What's the answer to my question then? Should I have been able to derive
>> > it somehow?
>>
>> I don't understand the question. How does the viewport affect the bounding
>> box?
>
>
> Suppose the iframe's document is
> <body style="position:relative; top:-100px; height:500px;
> background:yellow;"></body>
> What's the height of the bounding box? 400px or 500px?
>
> I just thought of another problem with allowing the contents of a
>> "seamless" iframe to overflow outside the iframe box.
>>
>> One of the main uses for this will be to sandbox blog comments, using the
>> yet-to-be-defined doc="" attribute, as in:
>>
>>   <iframe doc="<!DOCTYPE HTML><p>You suck"
>>           seamless sandbox="allow-same-origin"></iframe>
>>
>> If we allow the contents to flow out of the box, then we also allow blog
>> comments to start overlapping other content on the page.
>
>
> Yeah, although setting overflow:hidden on the iframe could be used to
> prevent that.
>
> > I'm concerned about the use case of very wide content in the iframe
>> > (i.e. content overflowing the root element horizontally); for example a
>> > forum with many wide messages, each of which is a seamless iframe. Right
>> > now it seems the choices are to either have a horizontal scrollbar in
>> > each message or clip each message horizontally, there's no way to make
>> > it work like a forum page.
>>
>> The way forum pages work now is that the content ends up screwing up the
>> rest of the page, so I think that's a good thing. :-) People work around
>> this now by forcing line break opportunities to exist in long URLs, etc,
>> or by setting overflow:auto on user-submitted content.
>
>
> Yes, although it would be nice to offer authors a choice. Oh well, I
> suppose it doesn't matter too much.
>
> Rob
> --
> "He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities;
> the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are
> healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his
> own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all." [Isaiah
> 53:5-6]
>
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