We’ll go through most of the features the iframe element provides and talk about how you use them, as well as how iframes can be useful for overcoming some tricky situations. To help you form your own opinion and sharpen your developer skills, we will cover all the essentials you should know about this controversial tag. Besides, it’s not that hard to secure them, so you won’t have to worry about your user’s machine becoming compromised. I believe that their bad reputation should not prevent you from relying on them they have many legitimate uses cases. Even though all modern browsers support them, many developers write endless articles advising against using them.

Inline frames are often used in social media plug-ins which collect user data, even if the website visitor doesn’t interact with a ‘like’ or ‘share’ button or is a registered user.The iframe element (short for inline frame) is probably among the oldest HTML tags and was introduced in 1997 with HTML 4.01 by Microsoft Internet Explorer. The content in an iframe could, for example, contain a harmful plug-in or the website owner could fall victim to a phishing attack without realising it.Īs data protection becomes a growing concern among website owners and users, iframes are hotly debated.

If you embed external content, it may harm your system. The security risk associated with iframes is of greater concern. This can affect search engine optimisation and therefore the ranking of a website. For example, it doesn’t handle embedded elements from search engines appropriately. In reality, inline frames are becoming increasingly less important because there are drawbacks to the method. In this way, the content is available to the user, even when other page elements haven’t been loaded. The iframe’s content is loaded independently from the rest of the website’s content. In addition, the integration has some technical advantages. As a result, user-friendliness increases considerably. Instead of sending the user to another domain, they can continue to surf the website. Inline frames are useful if you want to embed elements from external sources into your own site. All popular browsers such as Chrome, Firefox and Safari can display iframe content.

However, that’s rarely the case nowadays. Where the browser doesn’t load an iframe, the text of the iframe will be displayed. This space is used to accommodate alternative text. There is generally no content inside the tag bracket. The actual content of the iframe and part of its structure can only be arranged by using these attributes. vspace: Vertical space around the iframe.marginheight: Width of the upper and lower margin.marginwidth: Width of the left and right margins.longdesc: Long description of the frame.frameborder: Should the frame border be transparent?.align: What is the alignment of the frame?.scrolling: Should the inline frame be scrolled separately?.If you want to specify external content further, you should resort to CSS solutions for these functions. There are some other attributes, many of which are outdated and haven’t been supported since HTML5. srcdoc: Contains the HTML code, which is to be displayed in the iframe.sandbox: Connects the inline frame with specific security measures.height: Height of the frame which can be specified in pixels or per cent.width: Width of the frame which can be specified in pixels or per cent.src: Source of the content to be embedded, specified in the form of a URL.For the frame to be correctly filled out, you need to specify the following attributes:

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