IFRAME, you are dead to me

I know IFRAME, I know. We've had a good run. You've tried hard and back in the day you were somethin' special. The way you could bring in content from any domain was nothing short of amazing, and you certainly took out the trash when you bumped off FRAMESET. But that was then and this is now. A lot has changed in the past few years. CSS and AJAX are really hitting their stride and you just can't hack it. I'm willing to overlook a few margin bugs, but this?! Well this is simply the last straw.

We took a big chance on you. It's time to step up to the mobile platform and you blew it. We're making ebooks with fantastic interactive content. Tons of pages of web content that need to be pulled into a beautiful navigation frame. When people think of embedding a page they think of you: the mutha'effin' IFRAME! The 'I' used to stand for 'Internal', but now it just stands for 'Idiot'. You just blew it.

First you blew it on iOS with that whole two fingered scrolling thing. Seriously? Two fingers? WTF were you thinking?! Then on webOS you rendered perfectly thanks to an embedded web view back end. Sounds great except you forgot one tiny detail: you don't support any @#$! touch events. Your parent window can handle them just fine but you think you are too good for them. You can dance and sing but no one can touch you. You know what the TouchPad is? It's a touch device. Touch is even in the damn name. What the hell were you thinking? And don't even get me started on Android.

And finally, iOS 5. Your one last chance. Stylable with CSS. Proper event bubbling so that single touches work. Should be great. Your swan song. But no! You always expand to fit the content. Always. 100% of the time. Useless After all we've been through together. After all the good times and bad, this is how you repay me?!

IFRAME. You are dead to me.

(ps, just to show you we are serious, we've already built a beautiful prototype with Enyo 2.0, Ajax, and some clever CSS. Half the work for twice the power. Good riddance to you.)

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Posted March 7th, 2012

Tagged: ebooks rant