About

iframes

Back in the late 90s, every other website you visited used a frame-based layout. They were mazes of borders and scrollbars - ugly as can be, and a usability nightmare.

One reason they were so popular is that content could be separated into one single frame, with separate frames for navigation, the header, the footer, etc. Once you loaded the site and started navigating from page to page, the only thing that changed was that content frame; everything else stayed put. The main benefit was reduced loading time. Each time you loaded a subsequent page, only the content area had to be transferred - not the header, footer or navigation. With the Internet connection speeds of today, working so hard to save a few kilobytes seems laughable. But when you were surfing on a 28K dial-up modem, it could make the difference between an almost-enjoyable experience and ripping your hair out.

Gratefully, we don't have to micro-manage our kilobytes like that. Thus, for so many reasons, framesets (the official name for frame-based layouts) are now considered to be an obsolete relic and should not be used.

However, framesets had a little brother called the inline frame (aka iframe). Born in 1997, he quickly matured and soon displaced his older brothers.

The idea behind the iframe was to create a document element that displays a separate page, be that page from the same site or a different site. By no longer requiring frames to be an all-or-nothing proposition, content can be more distributed. You can incorporate a separate page, displaying it anywhere in your main page and manipulating the frame's options such as size and visibility as needed.

To provide protection to both the loading page (the one holding the iframe) and the loaded page (the one displayed inside the iframe), browsers implement a wall of protection between the two pages when they come from different sites. This wall prevents a frame from a different site from manipulating it's parent page, or vice versa.

The flexibility of iframes means they can be used for numerous purposes such as adding: weather, YouTube videos, ads, social media feeds, or really anything that might come from a third party site.
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Fanlistings

So what's a fanlisting? The definition according to TheFanlistings is this: A fanlisting is a web clique that lists fans of a particular subject. Unlike most web cliques, a person does not need a web site in order to join. Fans from around the world submit their information to their approved fanlisting and they are then listed to show their love for the subject.