October 22nd, 2020

Apologies. I thought the use-case sounded a lot like AMP’s top stories: > …show another page as an inset, and then activate it to perform a seamless transition to a new state, where the formerly-inset page becomes the top-level document. adactio.com/notes/17553

Note that I didn’t say that portals came from AMP; I said they would help the AMP use case. But I think I must be misunderstanding portals because it sounds to me like it would work great for the AMP top stories carousel. adactio.com/notes/17554

Jake, I’m not saying that if a technology is useful for AMP then it must be bad—see rel=”prerender”, as you say. I was honestly, genuinely trying to give an example of where portals could be used based on the description in the explainer. adactio.com/notes/17555

You’re right. I don’t have any in-depth knowledge here. I was trying to describe a proposal being incubated. I used an example. It was a bad example, I guess. From now on I’ll just describe portals as “spicy iframes” and leave it at that. adactio.com/notes/17556

It’s that emphasis on “between origins” that gets me (though I understand the security concerns, of course). Jake’s original proposal seemed more focused on same-origin page-level transitions …which is most single page apps today. adactio.com/notes/17557

Yeah …spicy! adactio.com/notes/17558

I wouldn’t mind if something like this shipped same origin by default. But, I wouldn’t want it done in a way that excludes cross-origin in future. The future is longer than the past, and designing ourselves into a corner is bad.

The same-origin is definitely the exciting use case. The anchor tag does cross origin transitions today (poorly) so this is a nice additive capability but not a new thing. (I think?) Google’s ever encroaching advertising empire is an entirely separate issue.

Does the anchor tag do navigation transitions? I mean, if we count “swap” as a transition I guess it does, but it seems like the whole point is that we want something more.

fwiw, in spec terms I’d like portals and iframes to inherit from something common, rather than one from the other. In the same way audio and video share a common base.

Totally! It (poorly) changes the state of the page. Arguably still better than the client re-rendering and often more accessible/perfomant. Lots of room to improve and pave that path. Client routers rarely animate so this would be a huge step forward in my view.

Ugh, yes, the cookie security model is a blight

A lot of SPAs would be better/faster if they weren’t SPAs. If we can solve that with a transition & prerendering thing, yes please!

I’ve been a fan since the concept was announced and wish I knew how to expedite. It’s badly needed. Our defaults in web userland rn are a rapidly expanding disaster.