Why do people still use iframes? [closed]

Question

For me iframes are pure evil (well, maybe not so pure). They seems to make a lot of troubles. Yes, your whole site will load once and then you can just load a single pages. But people invented AJAX for this purpose.

One of the biggest issues I found with iframe was that I couldn't paste a link to one of the subpages, because the URL never changed (yes, I know there is a workaround for this). Second thing, web search engines may have problems to index that sites correctly.

Sometimes the accessibility of this sites are worse and some browser can even display them improperly.

There are better ways to design layout without (i)frames. Everyday I can see some one asking at SO questions, like "How to access iframe with jQuery?".

So what are benefits of iframes? What reason can it be to still use them? I just would like to know why :)

(since it is not a real question, it's a CW)

Answer 1

iFrames are okay for some cases, as X-domain-requests, or posting data to a source via parameters. But when I want to access data across domains, I prefer using CSS-files - they can accept params, set cookies, add content to the page (:before & :after) and give a visual feedback.

Answer 2

I still see iframes being used in large corporations where they provide a single sign on which injects header information about the authenticated user which is then passed, via an iframe, towards the actual application(s). Since the "portal" surrounding the iframe handles all the specific authentication details those applications behind it don't need to have each an implementation for it, making things easier to make for the development team and having a single place to monitor and adjust authentication details of users.

Answer 3

Many Formatted Text Editors (e.g. TinyMCE, HTMLArea) are implemented as iframe.

Answer 4

If a user has javascript disabled, iframes will work when ajax doesn't. This is not out of the question, considering that people use things like NoScript.

Answer 5

Javascript WYSIWYG Editors use iframes, because that is easiest and best way to make it. For example TinyMCE uses it:

http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/

Answer 6

There are plenty of technical reasons to use them (especially the security issue mentioned by Dan Beam).

What you shouldn't do is use iframes “like frames”, doing navigation to new pages by updating the iframe only. As you say, this prevents the navigation from being bookmarkable/linkable, responding to the normal navigation buttons, and providing useful link affordances like open-in-new-tab.

But that's not peculiar to iframes. You can see more and more pages where the navigation is done by fetching new content with XMLHttpRequest and writing it to the main content div's innerHTML. Often this is done with jQuery load() and clever-clever slidey animations. This breaks navigation just as badly as iframe-used-as-frame, or indeed old-school framesets. It's a shame so many web authors are using this tactic believing it to be a super-modern web design methodology, when really it's just a new skin on yesterday's despised framesets.

You can work around it in both cases, but it means you have to store a viewstate in the # fragment identifier part and support proper hash-navigation, which isn't trivial. Even then you've still got problems with non-JS agents like search engines; you end up having to have a parallel ?-based and #-based navigation to support both. It's a pain and most don't bother.