CSS, Iframes and ensuring that content is visible

I have recently seen a talk about a problem with the web [1] that
brought up a to me previously unknown issue. The issue is about content
knowing if it is visible or not. Right now content does not know when it
is visible. It leads to several problems.

The first problem is performance. Some content is expensive to render.
While Flash has traditionally been the punching bag in this aspect, it
is far from the only culprit. Knowing when content isn't visible would
allow web applications to be good citizens, resulting in far better
results than any automated solution.

The second problem is measuring impressions. Some content, mainly ads,
need to know when the user has seen it.

The third problem is a security problem, clickjacking. For all zero of
you who don't know what clickjacking is, it is when one website embeds
another in a deceptive way in order to fool the user to interact with
the embeded content in an unintentional way. Such as pressing buttons
they didn't mean to.

The speaker shows a POC solution to these problems that involves some
rather internal knowledge of the user agent implementation (Chrome
specifically IIRC), but he does not propose any form of API so it is
hard to judge how it would work on the web.

Can, and most importantly, should, CSS be used to solve this issue?


[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wx2TnaRSGs I want these * bugs of
my * internet

Received on Tuesday, 15 September 2015 06:05:33 UTC