The Benefits of Iframe Based Development | Hacker News Reader

The Benefits of Iframe Based Development

stakedy.com

83 pointstoricalea56 comments

Honestly I think the scarier part is that "real" tech articles are rapidly approaching this level of quality and I can't tell if the "real" articles are being written by automation, or people who love to copy and paste. It's getting that bad. Modern tech journalism is just so vapid and devoid of any content, so even the parent post was more fun to read than the regular.

For an example, tech-based articles I loathe sifting through online are about anything related to recent events like a macOS update. Google Search: "macos big sur release notes" https://imgur.com/a/fmhyk6d

Imagine going to the first Apple link, not getting any details, and then moving onto the 3rd and 4th links hoping that some internet journalist broke down the details for you because the title includes "What's New?". Nope. The links all just resort to barely-updated articles that basically say "11.6.1 got released". Amazing, thank you tech journalists!

At least an article about iframes might give some boring facts to help crunch in your mind while your eyes glaze through.

3rd and 4th links:

- https://mrmacintosh.com/macos-big-sur-11-6-1-update-whats-ne...

- https://www.macworld.com/article/234324/macos-big-sur-faq.ht...

So, best I can tell the content on this site is AI generated, and I can uprank/downrank posts by using a token that I gain by listening to AI generated music?

I'm getting weird uncanny valley vibes lol.

lol if so that is awesome

Yeah I'm legitimately impressed.

It seems like passing an important AI test, like hacker news Turing test.

This is apparently HNs first rodeo.

If you look closely at the profile photo that the post is "Posted by", the distorted background makes it clear that it's a deepfake

Oh, I came to that conclusion after I had checked the image URIs which shows they are all in a subdirectory titled aipeople LOL

Also if you read the about pages on the site, it says the post authors are digital people that were bred (...i.e. two digital people mated) on its sister site Celody. You use Celody to earn tokens (by listening to generative music) that you can spend on mating digital people and drafting laws.

Wat.

https://celody.com/evolution.html

It is AI generated, but not a "deepfake" → a deepfake intends on using AI to impersonate a particular person.

I think there should be a term for the phenomenon when a term becomes popular and loses it's meaning from all the new people using it wrong.

Like how everything is a zero day now.

Bildungsmemen?

Leave German out of this!

I think we should co-opt an existing word and use it wrongly so it loses it's meaning and becomes the word for the phenomenon you described.

Would "phenomenon" do?!

pretty sure i matched with a dude on bumble business who was not who he said it was, his job title had AI researcher in there. sometimes his text would be grammatically correct, other times it would be txt spk

I'm glad you said this because I was really concerned when the article sounded legit but I couldn't make heads or tails of it.

Read all the 'about' pages on Stakedy and Celody. My takeaway is I think this guy is trying to create The Matrix on a blockchain and upload his brain there.

It's interesting but the site design is very poor. It looks fake like pretty much every other content regurgitating site out there

Iframes have always been "bad", ever since they were introduced by IE in the late 90s (?). Inconsistent browser support, weird janky way of existing in a page, having their own scrollbars, not being able to stretch to fit their content or move when pushed by adjacent content, were iframe issues that I remember being very apparent in that era.

but perhaps these issues have all been remedied? And Iframe is now the perfect container for a modern day component?

... passing messages directly between parts of a page distinctly unfashionable in the age of redux and context. Having each component be its own request to the server - bizarre-seeming in 2021 but maybe something transformational there if our future is moving back to server-rendered HTML ... some crazy blockchain webserver coordinating ui state across dozens of tiny frames in a webpage, each with its own crypto account ? ... could be great, who knows

[edit: if I have just engaged in debate with an AI programmed to generate absurdities (per @solarpunk's comment), I have some preconceptions I'll have to go and reevaluate now]

I recall seeing something about Spotify being done with iframes in this style.

Many modern web video players are iframe based for embedding in third party sites.

beats having to execute random third party script coode on your site

Iframes were a non-standard IE-only feature that also had accessibility issues and obviously wouldn't work in Netscape.

They were very handy for a variety of scenarios so it became part of the spec, but I think most self-respecting web developers avoided them out of principle.

If you read an article by an algorithm and then discuss it as if it were written by a human, was the turning test passed?

well, most people don't read the article. Only the headline.

Some look at it, but take it as a reason to argue knowingly.

not easy to take a conclusion ...

The article is not written by an AI - all the facts are correct, and the internal references within the sentences are all correct. I have used invisible iframes as security sandboxes for third party code. The “Modular Development” section is weak IMHO, since visible iframes introduce UI and UX issues.

It reads like something a web developer might write. I googled two sentences as a test, and they were both unique to that page and site.

Edit: code quality is questionable - by my reckoning. Look at code buttons on this page: https://celody.com/modules.html

> I googled two sentences as a test, and they were both unique to that page and site

It's not impossible to generate new sentences with AI, we've been able to do this for a long time.

The footer on https://stakedy.com/long/how-staking-on-stakedy-works.html (the about page) says:

> Stakedy is a product from digital people within Celody

I'm not sure if that means that the Authors of the posts are AIs, or if it's just made from the same people that made Celody. Maybe the ambiguity is on purpose?

> The article is not written by an AI - all the facts are correct, and the internal references within the sentences are all correct.

I don't see how this follows.

You seem to have started from the position that an AI can not write an article with correct facts and internal consistency, and then argued that since this article has correct facts and internal consistency, it can not have been written by an AI?

I am saying the quality of the content of that article is beyond the known capabilities of our current ML systems.

The overview is better than what you might find on stack exchange about using iframes for security sandboxes (Cue joke about intelligence and stack exchange).

Your comment is just saying “if you are responding to something that passes the Turing Test, how can you tell?”.

While the GPT-x kind of AI-text-generators had issues with grammar and internal consistency, they are not the only generators. I know of at least one industry (used cars) where the descriptions of the cars have all been AI-generated for the last 10 years.

Is there some service provider/tool for this that is widely used in the used car industry? Or just convergence on a common approach?

It's basically the service provider thing. Essentially, almost every used car lot in the US uses the same company for their website. They get their own domain and branding and it's mostly a unified database of cars across the country.

And it's not cool. They figured out a lot of dark patterns, like "number of photos, regardless of quality, is a strong driver to sale", so they started duplicating photos in a set to bump up the total photo count. They figured out they could reuse walk-around videos for any same make/model/trim/color across the country and nobody would notice when they walked in the lot the different door panel dings and such. Or they'd display a car that matches your very specific search, that was actually hundreds of miles away, to get you on the lot just to say "damn, we just sold it, but we got this other one in a different color".

I worked for them for about 3 months before I literally couldn't stomach it anymore. I threw up in my driveway, went to work, and gave my notice.

This article reads weirdly.

Like the questions in my exams where I don't exactly know the answer but I know the main defintion of the topic. Then in the last 5 minutes of the exam I just go ahead and write a bunch of stuff only based on the defintion of the main topic. I will reuse and rephrasee the same thing over and over to give some meat to the answer but it is not a great answer and provides zero insights.

IFRAMEs still require a top-level page and their positions still need CSS.

I usually use FRAMESET and FRAMEs: they are positioned perfectly in a grid, with no need for CSS or TABLE. There's no postMessage API: you can write <A target=other-frame-name> to navigate to a page in another FRAME.

HTML5 doesn't have FRAMESET, but all the browsers still support HTML4 perfectly.

IFrames are both terrible and awesome. I built and maintain zoid, which turns iframes into full-fledged components; it's been an adventure: https://github.com/krakenjs/zoid

interesting project. I wish Spotify's iframe-based web widgets would use this to provide a modicum of configurability, and also emit events so you knew when someone was playing something ...

I think this is the first time I've ever heard someone make a case FOR the use use of iframes. I have no opinion on it personally, but I remember reading more than a few articles treating them like the plague.

there is a use for them. I think I've used them three or four times in my career in the last 15 years and they worked great.

Our entire internal site [let us call it a CMS] is made using iframes. We are about to move toward something different because mobile. Suggestions welcome. We're a php shop.

PHP shop moving away from iframes because of responsiveness in 2021 is quite interesting to me for some reason. I can't quite put my finger on it...

PHP has been able to move on, and since it's server side language things are easier to change on a per-site basis. Iframes must remain fully backwards compatible or they break the web as a whole, same with anything else being rendered by the browser.

In a way PHP is one of the tools which helped to move away from iframes.

With "static" web pages people used iframes, so they didn't have to update navigation on all pages. With PHP you cod simply do <?php include ('menu.php');?> and had a single source of truth.

This makes about 90% of early PHP scripts :)

I’m using them in a css-based design tool I’m working on. The “canvas” is inside of an iframe so that I can completely control the styling irrespective of the application itself.

There are definitely a few scenarios where they are useful.

Is there any reason you're not just using shadow DOM?

Afaik that doesn’t solve the problem of global CSS. Whatever framework I use to build the application itself (right now I’m using Tailwind), I don’t want to risk it polluting the canvas itself.

edit: I'd never spent much time looking at shadow dom, but it does appear that you can encapsulate styles with a shadow root. Had no idea - that's really interesting, thanks!

iframes are a great tool while transitioning between platforms. I've used them to transition to new frontends without requiring a rewrite of 100% of the components. If there's a lesser-used-but-complicated piece of the site, you can slap it in an iframe. Spend a few hours sewing them together with JS message posting and it works fine.

It's not amazing, but it works.

Invisible iframes are fantastic for sandboxing third-party code, or perhaps modularising work from another team.

Avoiding cookies in iframes is important because browsers are getting more restrictive, so security for iframes is difficult to manage. We passed a unique session token to the iframes from the owning page using postMessage(), and the two servers (we controlled both) communicated directly for authentication (avoid putting authentication into the browser since your enemy controls it completely).

I have always found trying to use iframes as a visible section of your UI is really crappy. Troubles with keyboard focus, resizing, modal dialogs, scrolling, Mobile Safari quirks, detecting loading or other failures, yada yada yada.

I recently had to deal with the headaches of cookies and iframes. In my case, it was learning management software that used our external tool loaded in an iframe via LTI. I was specifically dealing with Safari but understood other browsers could become as strict as Safari for cookies in iframes.

After pursuing methods of getting user consent to use 3rd party cookies via the storage API, the end result was the user jumping through hoops by repeatedly clicking buttons to invoke user interaction in different contexts to eventually get a prompt to allow cookies. It did work, but there were strange bugs with it on mobile Safari... e.g., the prompt to allow cookies never appeared after clicking the button but after putting Safari in the background and going back to it, it did appear.

The UX of all this was pretty undesirable so we just gave up and had the tool open in a full window and wondered why we didn't think to do that from the beginning.

I, for one, welcome our new web developer overlords.

I’m confused! What’s going on here??

N. O. NO!

The issue is that browsers don't like 3rd party cookies used in iframe. But there is not a suitable alternative completely replacing cookies

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