[whatwg] cross-domain scrollIntoView on frames and iframes

[Ian Hickson]

On Fri, 3 Apr 2009, Ojan Vafai wrote:
>
> I'm suggesting an addition to cross-domain (i)frames that allows 
> scrolling specific content into view. The use case is sites that 
> aggregate data from many sites (e.g. search engines) and want to display 
> that data in an iframe. They can load the page in an iframe, but they 
> have no way to make the content visible as they don't have access to the 
> iframe's contents.
> 
> A few possible APIs come to mind. I personally prefer the javascripty 
> option below, but I'll include another one for good measure.
> 
> 1) Add a scrollPathIntoView (with a better name) on iframes that takes 
> either an xpath or a css selector and scrolls the specified item into 
> view. If no such item exists, it does nothing. If one or more such items 
> exist, it calls scrollIntoView on the first matching item.
>
> 2) Add a css or xpath expression to fragment identifiers. Tthe iframe 
> src can be set to http://foo.com#css(.foo <http://foo.com/#css(.foo> 
> #bar). Same as above applies. If there's no match, it's a noop. If there 
> is a match, it scrolls the first one into view.
> 
> In both cases, no explicit success or failure is returned to the caller 
> as that would leak the iframes DOM across domains.
> 
> This API can obviously be supported on same-domain iframes as well, but 
> it's not really necessary since you can just dig into the DOM of the 
> iframe.

On Mon, 6 Apr 2009, Jonas Sicking wrote:
> 
> From my point of view I'm not sure how interesting this whole feature 
> is. We had support in firefox for XPointer for many years and saw little 
> to no uptake. I'm not sure if anyone complained when we removed the 
> support even (which would be pretty remarkable).

It seems that with such an API and with some careful timing measurements, 
you could determine the contents of a foreign iframe. I'm not sure that's 
a good idea.

I tried to come up with some alternative solutions, but I really haven't 
been very successful.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
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