Google Launches Portal, an HTML Tag To Replace Iframe (zdnet.com) 109
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: At the I/O 2019 developer conference earlier this week, Google launched a new technology called Portals that aims to provide a new way of loading and navigating through web pages. According to Google, Portals will work with the help of a new HTML tag named . This tag works similarly to classic tags, allowing web developers to embed remote content in their pages. Google says portals allow users to navigate inside the content they are embedding --something that iframes do not allow for security reasons. Furthermore, portals can also overwrite the main URL address bar, meaning they are useful as a navigation system, and more than embedding content -- the most common way in which iframes are used today.
For example, engineers hope that when a user is navigating a news site, when they reach the bottom of a story, related links for other stories are embedded as portals, which the user can click and seamlessly transition to a new page. The advantage over using Portals over classic links is that the content inside portals can be pre-loaded while the user scrolls through a page, and be ready to expand into a new page without having the user wait for it to load. In a demo, you can see that Portals allow users to watch/listen to embedded content and then transition seamlessly to its origin page, where they could leave comments or open other media.
For example, engineers hope that when a user is navigating a news site, when they reach the bottom of a story, related links for other stories are embedded as portals, which the user can click and seamlessly transition to a new page. The advantage over using Portals over classic links is that the content inside portals can be pre-loaded while the user scrolls through a page, and be ready to expand into a new page without having the user wait for it to load. In a demo, you can see that Portals allow users to watch/listen to embedded content and then transition seamlessly to its origin page, where they could leave comments or open other media.
What now? (Score:5, Funny)
According to Google, Portals will work with the help of a new HTML tag named .
I'm confused, is it named "space" or "period"?
Re: What now? (Score:2)
I'm afraid this is going to make regex even more confusing.
OTOH, every time you make an iframe, a kitten dies. So there's that.
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The internet wouldn't work without cats to power it, but still...
I'd need to see clear signs of a kitten shortage before I would load an iframe just to save one.
Climbing a tree, ok. Jumping in the river, ok. But loading an iframe?! Only if it was Ceiling Cat.
Re:What now? (Score:5, Informative)
According to Google, Portals will work with the help of a new HTML tag named <portal>. This tag works similarly to classic tags, allowing web developers to embed remote content in their pages.
Someone goofed and didn't use the escape characters for the less than/greater than. Caused me to scratch my head too.
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According to Google, Portals will work with the help of a new HTML tag named <portal>. This tag works similarly to classic tags, allowing web developers to embed remote content in their pages.
Someone goofed and didn't use the escape characters for the less than/greater than. Caused me to scratch my head too.
According to Google, Portals will work with the help of a new HTML tag named <portal>. This tag works similarly to classic <iframe> tags, allowing web developers to embed remote content in their pages.
If you're going to correct the missing tags, at least get both of them.
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Yes.
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I await the day when slashdot uses spaceperiod.
Just as "spacetime" is preferred when discussing the Universe, "spaceperiod" is obviously preferred when discussing text-formatting. :-)
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More ads. Lots of approved ads.
Dave Bowman [fandom.com] stares into the abyss and whispers, "My God it's full of ads."
(Or somethings like that [c2.com].)
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Faster "free" internet too.
Its great until the ad blockers stop working
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It's named "you can't see it, but you're actually browsing this page THROUGH this other page which is logging your every move. Enjoy!"
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It is a portal to space .
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Schrödinger's cat.
Re: Seems legit right? Google wouldn't spy... (Score:1)
lol, google is intentionally creating something to enable a thing that has been on the OWASP top 10 pretty much forever
https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Cross-site_Scripting_(XSS)
Re: Seems legit right? Google wouldn't spy... (Score:3)
Re:Seems legit right? Google wouldn't spy... (Score:5, Insightful)
Google says portals allow users to navigate inside the content they are embedding --something that iframes do not allow for security reasons
So, of course, it'll be a-okay inside a portal ... or becoming yet another security problem in 3... 2... 1...
W3C? (Score:1)
https://wicg.github.io/portals/
At least it's a W3C thing.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
> This specification was published by the Web Platform Incubator Community Group. It is not a W3C Standard nor is it on the W3C Standards Track. Please note that under the W3C Community Contributor License Agreement (CLA) there is a limited opt-out and other conditions apply. Learn more about W3C Community and Business Groups.
God you're fucking dumb aren't you you piece of shit google shill
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You mean a Google thing that they pushed into the W3C? By that standard, so is the Adobe Flash format.
Sounds ominous (Score:5, Insightful)
Not a web developer but this sounds like it will be abusive on our bandwidth preloading stuff we might have zero interest in... And potentially abusable by all sorts of asshats...
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What are you talking about? This is an advertiser/spy's wet dream. It's like iframes, which everyone hated because they were abused so much, except *better*.
Google, who has a vested interest in perverting the web, needs to be not allowed to create web standards.
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Google says portals allow users to navigate inside the content they are embedding -- something that iframes do not allow for security reasons.
What could possibly go wrong?
It's ok, if you use it in a Google AMP, then you can use a Google FEF (Flutter Embedded Flask) to ensure malware requests from remote (or other malware) domains can't inject XSS into your page.
You just need to use the right framework.
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Under that web sites can push you files of various types and they sit there waiting for the tab, or others, to make a normal request for them. So this is just an extension, into a new area, of existing feature.
As for the bandwidth issue I know in chrome you can totally disable http/2 but I don't know about just stopping the push feature in chrome or other browsers.
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Yep.
I can see that it might be potentially useful for a componentized website in a way that iframes aren't.
But browsers already have way too much useful functionality that doesn't have sufficient limits to prevent it from being horribly abused to the detriment of users, where ultimately - regardless of how useful it can be - we would be better off it didn't exist and therefore couldn't be abused.
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So... Just like everything else in HTML, people can abuse it to make crappy web pages. Dates back at least to Netscape's blink tag, probably earlier.
It actually seems like a good idea, because at the moment we have all kinds of janky Javascript based crap to simulate something approximating what this new tag does, but not very well. It's always going to be better to have a native option that is properly handled by the browser UI on mobile and desktop, and which doesn't require a 9000kb Javascript library an
Overwrite? Really? (Score:1)
"portals can also overwrite the main URL address bar" sounds like a terrible idea, unless they mean there's a way to follow a link in a portal that makes it the main page instead of keeping it in the portal.
Overall this sounds complicated for users and browser developers. Congratulations Google on earning your "New Microsoft" badge!!!
Re: Overwrite? Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
And just wait, they're getting ready to launch a huge press blitz about how they are the *privacy* provider.
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Just like the Mafia is a business not getting burned down provider.
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They're demonstrably worse than Microsoft
Then demonstrate it as you so claim.
Android is a cesspool.
In what regard? An open app store allows developers to do what they want? The horror!
Nest is soon to be canceled.
Nest is currently being heavily integrated into Google Home. They aren't cancelling it, they are developing it further.
Fuchsia is just more fragmentation.
A big claim for a system that no one has seen running yet.
Treble doesn't work.
Treble is the latest in the effort to continuously improve Android deployments. The efforts to date have resulted in my phone getting an update once every major Android release (if I was lucky), to once every 2 mon
Re: Overwrite? Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
They don't keep it secret from the 2nd party (themselves.) Apple seems to. Apple makes it easy for end users to block the access of those evil other people hoovering up data to anything interesting.
Oh, and Google just buys the data from those 3rd parties anyway.
where they could leave comments (Score:3)
you can see that Portals allow users to watch/listen to embedded content and then transition seamlessly to its origin page, where they could leave comments or open other media.
What? Comments? What are those??
Oh YEAH, I've heard about those. In the bad old days, people could actually talk about their own incorrect opinions, or promote an obviously untruthful fact. Imagine THAT: someone could have a thought that might actually OFFEND someone else. Incredible, but then again, those were savage times.
Now-days, our planetary government has correctly made all internet sites read-only, where only officially sponsored text is released. It's so much nicer not having to be continually afraid of being offended by someone and to always have the absolute truth available at any moment.
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first they came for the slanderers and i said nothing.
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first they came for the slanderers and I said nothing.
Most insightful comment I've read all month. Could have capitalized your I, though.
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i really don't understand why the lower-case i bothers so many people. it is in fact the original form.
i am glad, however, that you appreciate my observation.
It can do what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Furthermore, portals can also overwrite the main URL address bar, meaning they are useful as a navigation system, and more than embedding content -- the most common way in which iframes are used today.
Sure, navigation seems useful, but I can imagine LOTS of reasons I don't want this ... For one, the same security reasons iframes can't do this.
Where's the Security Magic? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Google says portals allow users to navigate inside the content they are embedding --something that iframes do not allow for security reasons."
OK, so what do Portals do to provide the necessary security, that iFrames do not? Or has Google decided that security is someone else's problem? Or did the iFrame security restriction turn out to be unnecessary?
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Missing option, you totally could navigate within iframes. I have no idea what they're talking about.
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I don't even think that is true, or at least was true when they were initially released.
Google ... take over the web. (Score:3)
Google engineers hope that their new Portals technology will take over the web and become the standard way in which websites transition between links.
Reading the words "Google" and "take over the web" in the same sentence always makes my butt twitch.
For example, engineers hope that when a user is navigating a news site, when they reach the bottom of a story, related links for other stories are embedded as portals, which the user can click and seamlessly transition to a new page.
Why do they "hope", much less care. Perhaps this will somehow benefit Google more than us.
The advantage over using Portals over classic links is that the content inside portals can be pre-loaded while the user scrolls through a page, and be ready to expand into a new page without having the user wait for it to load.
I'm not a big fan of pre-loading content (or DNS resolutions) and always make attempts to disable it in the browser.
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Who's going to be deciding which link to preload? Is it going to be the developer saying preload all of these links? The browser like it tries to do now? Or will Google be adding something to their browser that keeps track of what you read, examines the contents of the portal, and preloads the most likely link(s) that you are going to click on?
With all of this preloading going on it's going to make hit counters and page views even more worthless statistics that what they are now. Good luck using those progr
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That it is an HTML tag already answers all those questions, though.
The developer will decide when to use a portal tag, and the browser will decide if it actually preloads anything or not. Power users will use a browser extension to control the process.
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After digging into it some more it looks like it's the developer that does the controlling. See the demo at https://web.dev/hands-on-porta... [web.dev]
It's not just the the portal tag. There's a bunch of scripting involved in the background. Give me a browser that doesn't support this or at least let's me turns this off.
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Reading the words "Google" and "take over the web" in the same sentence always makes my butt twitch.
That's what they're counting on. I didn't think they still had their mojo, but I guess they do.
I'm just glad it is client side and therefore easy to turn off. (For people who have freedom-respecting browsers)
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Hopefully all browsers will support an option to search and replace "portal" with "a"
I for one welcome our new tentacle iframe space (Score:2)
I for one welcome our new tentacle iframe space overlords and their use of the space period space to wall off space from periods.
We've all seen what happens when tentacles ooze red, and it's not pretty, unless it is, cause it's natural and where the heck are the tentacle napkins?
WTF (Score:2)
Do not leave Google.com. Ever (Score:1)
Chrome (Score:4, Insightful)
This, and various other recent /. posts about new google web "features", are the kinds of things that should have everyone terrified at Chrome market share. Google has such a large share of the web browser market that it can effectively invent its own web standards, make Chrome understand them and then other browsers must implement them or become "incompatible". I, for one, do *not* welcome our new Google Overlords.
That sounds like a _really_ bad idea (Score:2)
iFrames are limited the way they are for very good reasons. These "portals" sound like an invitation to attackers of all kinds.
Well it depends (Score:2)
For Google there is probably some advantage as it might centralize the web even more or give rise to more web "malware", so it might make sense for them to promote.
Of course normal web users usually have quite different needs and wants, but those don't count in an oligopoly like we have with web browsers.
doesn't matter (Score:2)
Google the new Microsoft, embrace and extend? (Score:3)
So now that Google got pretty much every leading browser to use Chromium, they are starting to do proprietary extensions of the HTML standard? We have been here before with Internet Explorer and its proprietary technologies with Active this, Active that and what not ... it did not go well and it took more than a decade to undo.
This "portal" thingie may or may not be a good thing, I don't know ... but please Google for the love of everything that is holy, go through the normal HTML standardization process, and do not start doing your own thing. If you do, I will at least do my insignificant little part to fight you by continuing to shout "break up the evil monopoly" every time I mention Google on the Internet.
And it begins... (Score:3)
Who remembers IE6? Microsoft had a dominant share of the browser market, and started to infect the web with proprietary extensions. A great way to ensure continuing marketing dominance. It took us years to get rid of IE6, and it was nowhere near as dominant as Chrome.
Now that Microsoft is also using the Chrome engine, Google has a near monopoly on browser market share. Now they are introducing new HTML tag? You won't find this tag in the HTML standard. In fact, the introduction to the portal specification [github.io] explicitly states "...is not a W3C Standard nor is it on the W3C Standards Track." They clearly think that they have enough power to ignore standards - in fact, to become the new de facto standards dictator.
Is this required? (Score:3)
Content is pre-loaded _in case_ the user wants a _seamless_ transition to another site. So use up more bandwidth for the possibility that the user will save milliseconds transitioning to another page. Does that use-case sound absolutely unnecessary? Making it almost certain that there is an ulterior motive.
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