as a third party website, be able to embed site content into my page

[diego-]

non-iframe methodology required.

per sprint demo walk-through, july 24, 2015

[LisaGee]

Currently College Scorecard lives on the WH website at: https://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/education/higher-education/college-score-card

We need to provide them with similar functionality.

[shawnbot]

@diego- can you tell us more about what we can use? JavaScript? Image tags? SVG?

[ErieMeyer]

@konklone @noahkunin -- I somehow remember you having ideas around this.

[diego-]

• [x] explore as 'oembed' methodology (double check with @noahkunin)
• [ ] draft instructions for embedding in page
• [ ] @jjoteal, what page components should we include/not include in the embed?

[LisaGee]

Diego - Can you write up instructions that we can give to the WH.gov so they know how to do when we have the oembed.

[konklone]

Those ideas are more around data going in the reverse direction -- where a .gov site embeds non-government third party services. That's super-common and has some interesting privacy ramifications.

Government providing its own embeds also has some interesting privacy ramifications, but it sounds like this ticket is currently pretty concerned with technical implementation details.

I only know one non-iframe approach on a major website off the top of my head, which is GitHub's gist embedding. You can see an example of this in an old blog post of mine - GitHub's JavaScript writes elements directly into the parent document's DOM. It's probably more work on GitHub's part to make sure it can play nicely with others' sites, but also probably helps that their content is essentially always full-page-width. They're not making little business-card-like rectangles or things to fit into sidebars. So they can expect their embed to be a first class expanded presentation.

[diego-]

For this feature, are we implementing some frontend "buttons" to created embed code for any third party, or for now, is the scope of this issue limited to providing a custom embed code for the WH?

[diego-]

Per daily standup @ Aug 18, this is going to be custom embed code.

[NoahKunin]

Checking off first box. Discussion complete. As previously indicated over email + Slack, IFRAMEs will continue to be blocker per Nginx, our web server.

Anything that uses the API, or some other method of programmatically consuming our content/data, is :a: :ok:

[LisaGee]

We'll also need to do outreach to WhiteHouse website admin to make sure they are teed up to make the change for Launch.

[ErieMeyer]

Am in contact with WH team -- they're ready for new embed code whenever.

[rustypickens]

Hi team! For projects like this our preference is to use GitHub Pages where possible. It's super-easy for us to jump off from WH.gov to there if that works for you? We've done it in the past with things like the Tax Receipt to great success. Close-second options would be the iframe or embed approaches. Beyond that, things get a lot more difficult in terms of what we're able to give you direct control over without our own devs to support. Happy jump in to other conversations if you need us (and if I need to get a dev directly in the conversation too.)

[ErieMeyer]

@nacin -- this is all you!

[shawnbot]

This is in progress by @nacin in #1237 and #1238.

[diego-]

WH working on flat alternative as discussed. Moving to accept for us to check upon completion.

[nacin]

The end result here — wh.gov directly links to collegescorecard.ed.gov, rather than embedding anything — is in my opinion a better permanent solution. I suggest we close the PRs #1237 and #1238, as well as this issue.

If were to need embedding, I like the iframe as the best initial approach and, as noted in #1237, it was feasible from a technical and security standpoint. Long term would have meant a bit of a refactoring of the JS and CSS behind the home page, so only some of it could be embedded on wh.gov, rather than everything (which would pose both current and future problems). In practice, if we don't need embedding for wh.gov, then we should close this out.

Now, the title of this user story ("as a third party website, be able to embed site content into my page") could be read far more broadly — as in, providing something like the ability to embed a single college "card" (like GitHub, YouTube, Twitter, etc.) Could be a nice feature at some point in the future, but I don't think that's what was intended here.

[barkimedes]

Links on https://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/education/higher-education that refer to college scorecard do link to the new scorecard. Based on the comments in this thread, it seems that the decision was to not embed anything in the page directly, so based on that that, I think the issue can be closed.

If in the future someone wants to try embedding single cards in their sites, I think they can create a new issue for that.

[LisaGee]

I still really would like a 3rd party site to be able to embed our content on their website. Anything we can do to facilitate distribution of the data in any form I think would be valuable.