When UIO meets <iframe>

Wed Mar 7 22:35:30 UTC 2012

That's a sensible long-term approach. Can we think of what strategies we have at our disposal in cases where older content can't be retrofitted with support for UI Options? I imagine that this is the case with OER Commons--there may be really useful content that isn't actively maintained anymore but that would still benefit from UI Options' features.

Colin

On 2012-03-07, at 3:13 PM, Antranig Basman wrote:

> To me, this problem of styling content hosted from external sites lies squarely in the "wider mission" of UIO, that is, to be not only an application local to a page, but one which enables a user's preferences to be stored in a central "cloud" location, shared across multiple sites.
> My feeling is that we shouldn't try to address this issue with OER without starting to create the extra designs and infrastructure that we were planning for the "wider mission" of UIO.
> 
> Cheers,
> Antranig
> 
> On 07/03/2012 10:28, Li, Cindy wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I'm at the stage of evaluating the problems we may encounter at implementing UI Options onto http://www.oercommons.org. Dealing with<iframe>  is one major issue.
>> 
>> http://www.oercommons.org uses<iframe>  to display the contents of OER items that are from other websites. In this example page - http://www.oercommons.org/courses/acoustics-for-music-theory/view,<iframe>  points to an external link http://cnx.org/content/m13246/latest/. As predictable, the UIO settings' adjustments aren't able to be applied onto the iframe content.
>> 
>> I'm listing 2 ideas that were in my mind but all turned out mission-impossible in case they could be fleshed out:
>> 
>> 1. Replace iframe with div by ajax fetching the external link and displaying<body>  part in a div. However, maintaining the css styling, js and other inclusions would be a good problem at the drop of<head>.
>> 
>> 2. Improve UIO to deal with this type of<iframe>, which involves the cross site scripting that is against the "law".
>> 
>> Your thoughts are appreciated.
>> 
>> Thanks
>> 
>> Cindy

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Colin Clark
Technical Lead, Fluid Project
http://fluidproject.org