Enabling Mashups in Internet Explorer 8 with Cross Document Messaging

Browser Security News » Blog Archive » Enabling Mashups in Internet Explorer 8 with Cross Document Messaging

Tue, 20 May 2008 02:20:00 GMT

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re: Enabling Mashups in Internet Explorer 8 with Cross Document Messaging

Ian Hickson — Tue, 20 May 2008 03:04:39 GMT

Here's a link to the actual spec:

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/section-crossDocumentMessages.html

re: Enabling Mashups in Internet Explorer 8 with Cross Document Messaging

Jeff Walden — Tue, 20 May 2008 03:18:33 GMT

Note that the interface implemented by the current IE8 beta lags the HTML5 specification by several revisions in backwards-incompatible ways, so if you're going to experiment with this, be aware that what you're doing will break in a future revision of IE8.

To save a little effort, the changes are as follows:

- domain/uri properties are replaced with a single "origin" property, basically everything before the start of the path in a URI (excluding the username/password part) -- so http://example.com, http://example.org:8080, etc.

- window.postMessage requires two arguments, the first being the message, the second being the expected origin of the target window, in the same format as above; if the target window's location doesn't match this argument, nothing happens

- window.postMessage dispatches events asynchronously, so after you dispatch you have to return from your event handler to allow the postMessage event to be dispatched

- the target of the event is the window on which you called postMessage, not the document within it

The Mozilla Developer Center also has good documentation of postMessage which may be useful:

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/DOM:window.postMessage

I think that covers all the relevant bases, but of course, refer to the spec for exact details (URI in previous comment).

re: Enabling Mashups in Internet Explorer 8 with Cross Document Messaging

Jeff Walden — Tue, 20 May 2008 03:19:41 GMT

By the way, commenting on this post consistently failed in Firefox 2 -- probably want to investigate that and figure out what's wrong.

re: Enabling Mashups in Internet Explorer 8 with Cross Document Messaging

Jim — Tue, 20 May 2008 05:29:59 GMT

There's a good article on this here:

http://virtuelvis.com/archives/2005/12/cross-document-messaging

You can try it out in Opera, which already supports this feature.

re: Enabling Mashups in Internet Explorer 8 with Cross Document Messaging

Jeff Walden — Tue, 20 May 2008 05:50:40 GMT

Be careful with the Opera link, too -- it describes an even *earlier* version of the method that puts the method on document. I think their latest betas moved to window, but they haven't made the uri/domain to origin change or most of the changes I mentioned in my first comment, either. As I understand it, only Firefox 3 RC1 and recent WebKit nightlies are fully up-to-spec on this. It'll be awesome once everyone's up to spec so we can really start playing with this stuff.

re: Enabling Mashups in Internet Explorer 8 with Cross Document Messaging

Jeff Walden — Tue, 20 May 2008 06:01:03 GMT

Hm, now commenting from Firefox 2 is succeeding. I have no idea what's going on here.

re: Enabling Mashups in Internet Explorer 8 with Cross Document Messaging

Awesome Bar — Tue, 20 May 2008 17:23:01 GMT

The text selection options in the IE8 location bar are much better than any previous version of IE however the location bar falls massively short of the utter brilliance of the Firefox 3 location bar.

http://www.dria.org/wordpress/archives/2008/04/17/628/

Awesome Bar indeed! I certainly hope that the IE team manages to pull off something good with IE8 and that the location bar is actually far from code-complete.

re: Enabling Mashups in Internet Explorer 8 with Cross Document Messaging

Rob — Tue, 20 May 2008 17:36:32 GMT

"Note that the interface implemented by the current IE8 beta lags the HTML5 specification by several revisions..."

Every blog post and article should include that statement about IE and any current or edge technology.

re: Enabling Mashups in Internet Explorer 8 with Cross Document Messaging

untitled.bmp — Wed, 21 May 2008 19:04:11 GMT

untitled.bmp untitled.bmp untitled.bmp untitled.bmp untitled.bmp untitled.bmp untitled.bmp untitled.bmp untitled.bmp untitled.bmp untitled.bmp untitled.bmp untitled.bmp untitled.bmp untitled.bmp untitled.bmp untitled.bmp untitled.bmp untitled.bmp untitled.bmp untitled.bmp untitled.bmp untitled.bmp untitled.bmp untitled.bmp untitled.bmp untitled.bmp

sorted that crap coding problem yet in IE8?

re: Enabling Mashups in Internet Explorer 8 with Cross Document Messaging

untitled.bmp — Wed, 21 May 2008 19:04:37 GMT

untitled.bmp

sort it out!

HR tags & CSS! Light document object!

AH — Thu, 22 May 2008 04:16:21 GMT

Just hoping for a fully-styleable HR element in IE8

as well as the optional lightweight Document object (as FF, Opera, Safari all have)

HTML5

AH — Thu, 22 May 2008 04:17:08 GMT

Oh, and I'm glad to hear you're finally working with WHATWG on HTML5, if I read this correctly :)

re: Enabling Mashups in Internet Explorer 8 with Cross Document Messaging

billybob — Thu, 22 May 2008 17:37:02 GMT

I see it is the same Microsoft here... WHY does your version of a standard function always have to be slightly different to the actual spec?

For a start, your function declaration is different to the one in the spec and makes the second parameter optional. Your documentation does not specify what happens if you do not specify the target origin.

In addition you break a number of the 5 steps you MUST take.

1. According to the spec, not supplying targetOrigin should result in a SYNTAX_ERR exception being thrown but your version allows it to be null.

2. Your documentation says "The postMessage method call does not return until the event listeners of the target document have finished executing." which is in direct contradiction with the spec which says it should return as soon as it has validated the targetOrigin.

Please explain...

re: Enabling Mashups in Internet Explorer 8 with Cross Document Messaging

Jeff Walden — Thu, 22 May 2008 19:26:25 GMT

To be fair, the spec only recently changed to what it is now from what Microsoft had implemented, so it's not entirely fair to complain that Microsoft implemented the spec incorrectly -- they were correct as of a few weeks ago! Very few changes can or should be made with that sort of immediate turnaround without degrading quality or corrupting the development process (and in any case, IE betas don't happen nearly as often as nightlies from other browsers, so it still might have been awhile after the fix anyway).

That said, I'm not sure why they posted this article so early knowing that their implementation was tracking an older version of the spec which is incompatible with the current version. It seems like it would have been better for everyone if they'd updated to match the latest spec and only then made this post.

re: Enabling Mashups in Internet Explorer 8 with Cross Document Messaging

Mitch 74 — Fri, 23 May 2008 15:52:32 GMT

Let's just hope that they will actually update the implementation - you just have to see how 'fast' updating the event object was to get anxious about this, too!

A little history... IE 4 implemented the event object according to a W3C draft, in 1996 (or early 1997) if my memory serves me well. Following that, the W3C event object was made more flexible in order to cover the Netscape event model too - leading to the current W3C event model.

Since then, some developers hoped for an update in IE 5 (1998), IE 5.5 (1999) or IE 6 (2001); not luck here. Again, in IE 7 (2006): no cigar. And it doesn't seem to be intended for IE 8 either.

Strangely, Opera (and Webkit/KHTML too) has been able to implement both models without too much trouble, as the W3C model is actually a superset of IE's model: so, backward compatibility can be kept (methods have different names) and standards support improved (IE is the only current browser not supporting the W3C event model).

All in all, in ten years the event object has progressed a whopping... er... Nothing. In IE.

Let's hope HTML5 mashups update will be infinitely faster...

re: Enabling Mashups in Internet Explorer 8 with Cross Document Messaging

Lenen — Fri, 23 May 2008 19:26:28 GMT

Jim, thanks for that article, really informative. A good site also!

re: Enabling Mashups in Internet Explorer 8 with Cross Document Messaging

Michael — Fri, 23 May 2008 23:41:56 GMT

thanks for this article about "mashups" !

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