Are iframes considered 'bad practice'? [closed]

Answer 1

Having worked with them in many circumstances, I've really come to think that iframe's are the web programming equivalent of the goto statement. That is, something to be generally avoided. Within a site they can be somewhat useful. However, cross-site, they are almost always a bad idea for anything but the simplest of content.

Consider the possibilities ... if used for parameterized content, they've created an interface. And in a professional site, that interface requires an SLA and version management - which are almost always ignored in rush to get online.

If used for active content - frames that host script - then there are the (different) cross domain script restrictions. Some can be hacked, but rarely consistently. And if your framed content has a need to be interactive, it will struggle to do so beyond the frame.

If used with licensed content, then the participating sites are burdened by the need to move entitlement information out of band between the hosts.

So, although, occaisionally useful within a site, they are rather unsuited to mashups. You're far better looking at real portals and portlets. Worse, they are a darling of every web amateur - many a tech manager has siezed on them as a solution to many problems. In fact, they create more.

Answer 2

I have seen IFRAMEs applied very successfully as an easy way to make dynamic context menus, but the target audience of that web-app was only Internet Explorer users.

I would say that it all depends on your requirements. If you wish to make sure your page works equally well on every browser, avoid IFRAMEs. If you are targeting a narrow and well-known audience (eg. on the local Intranet) and you see a benefit in using IFRAMEs then I would say it's OK to do so.

Answer 3

When your main page loads in HTTP protocol and parts of your page need to work in HTTPS protocol, iFrame can beat jsonp hands down.

Especially, if your dataType is not natively json and needs to be translated on server into json and translated on client back into e.g. complex html.

So nope - iFrame is not evil.

Answer 4

Based on my experience a positive side for iframe are when calling third party codes, that may involve calling a javascript that calls a has a Document.write(); command. As you may know, these commands cannot be called asynchronously due to how it is parsed (DOM Parser etc). An example of this is http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpadsnew/ I've made use of iframes to help speed up our site as there were multiple calls to phpadsnews and the site was waiting for the response before proceeding to render different parts of the page. with an iframe I was able to allow the site to render other parts of the page and still call the Document.write() command of phpads asynchronously. Preventing and js locking.

Answer 5

It's 'bad practice' to use them without understanding their drawbacks. Adzm's post sums them up very well.

On the flipside, gmail makes heavy use of iFrames in the background for some of it's cooler features (like the automatic file upload). If you're aware of the limitations of iFrames I don't believe you should feel any compunction about using them.