[whatwg] cross-domain scrollIntoView on frames and iframes

[Ojan Vafai]

On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 11:38 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:

> 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.


Can you expand on what you
mean a bit? I'd like to see if there's still a way we can meet the use-case.


> I tried to come up with some alternative solutions, but I really haven't
> been very successful.
>
> --
> Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
> http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
> Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
>
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