Question

I am developing a webpage which our customers want to insert on their websites by wrapping my page in an iframe (cross domain). I don’t need to interact with the parent or know anything about whats outside the iframe.

I am using HTML, CSS, Javascript and Webservices.

Question: How am I limited inside an iframe compared to if my page was running outside the iframe?

Answer 1

You’re not. Any JS linked within the iframe from your domain will act in the context of the iframe. Aside from being crammed into an unusual container it should work the same as it would if it was loaded independently.

If your needs should change however, there are ways to send signals between parent frame and iframe if both pages have JS written to cooperate. There’s methods using the # in URLs which can be read by the parent and don’t force page reloads and I believe they share the window.resize event which can be fired manually without actually resizing the window.

UPDATE: There are far better ways to communicate between cross-domain iframes now than there used to be. Naturally you’ll still require cooperating JS on both ends but you can use window.postMessage rather than triggering messages via window.resize and data after a hash symbol in the URL. That was a cool trick though.