Do we need an iframe tag?

Question

Following up on this little discussion with @toscho in chat I went through the first 50 most relevant of 800 questions that contain the word 'iframe' and found there a actually quite some questions that pertain to how to use the <iframe> tag in the WP context.

EDIT: more examples added

1. Here's an example I created
2. Another one (there are quite some questions of this type: how to split templates in iframes?)
3. One more (this is about allowing iframes in widgets)

Before I proceed retagging the most relevant questions I thought I'd test if I get thumbs up for this.

The downside I can think of is that this tag might easily get polluted with off topic questions ("there's an iframe in my site that I didn't put there and it is loading a script from welovemayhem.ru, what is happening?")

Answer 1

The element iframe (like the rarely used object) is somewhat special in WP, because its use is bound to the role of the post author, and even that is different on single-sites and multi-sites.

Maybe there are enough on-topic questions possible to justify this, like: How can I enable the element for other roles? Are there security concerns that can be handled with WP functions?

Having that tag would make it easier for askers to find related questions, because the algorithm for that is comparing question tags.

On the other hand, maybe this could be covered by our existing embed tag? Then again, that tag is broader than iframe. You can embed something as a DOM node per JavaScript without using iframe or object …

We don't need a tag for every HTML element like we don't need one for every WP function. The basic purpose of a tag is to group related questions so they can be found easier. At the same time, a tag should be specific enough to distinguish its use from other tags.

I think both criteria are met for a tag iframe.

Answer 2

My opinion would be that iframes are used quite actively in core, even though the relevant bits are not that often extended/customized.

I hadn't paid attention to the tag, but unless it's A Big Problem with off topic then I would guess it makes sense.

Answer 3

I'm unconvinced we need an iframe tag, because iframes are not an easily defined WordPress development issue.

When iframe questions do come up, they're usually in the context of something else that we have a tag for, such as visual-editor or tinymce in the case of this question, menus in the case of this one, and widgets in the case of this one (using the three examples cjbj provided).

There is likely to be quite a bit of disambiguation between the various uses of this tag - eg. 'my iframe tag got filtered' is a completely different category of iframe question than 'I want to show a portion of my WordPress menu in an iframe'.

Because of this disambiguation:

• it's likely that iframe questions will require expertise in completely different parts of WordPress;
• and, iframes are unlikely to be the core issue being asked about - the core issues in the examples above are filtering of disallowed tags, and displaying WordPress content outside of the WordPress environment.

I think because of this a tag for iframes wouldn't serve an easily definable purpose, and could possibly end up as a candidate for removal in the future.