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One of the interesting additions of html5 is the the notion of seamless iframe, that is, an iframe that looks like it is part of the parent web-page, inheriting its styles and such. While this feature is not widely available, in fact the Webkit nightly only had it for a few days, I found some interesting use for it: testing new blog posts.

While Wordpress offers some modicum of WYSIWIG editing, I tend to write the html myself, partly because I have heavily customise the CSS of the blog, partly because I tend to use features that are awkward to use in an editor, like tables, or are not supported at all, like using non-breaking thin spaces in front of punctuation in French texts, i.e. following the typographical rules.

More and more, I write the blog entry in a text-editor, which is more confortable and much faster than using a web-interface (I know, I'm old school). This also has the advantage of working offline, which in a country where trains tend to go through tunnels, is a nice advantage. Still it would be nice to be able to preview the general look of the page.

Now I can do this using a seamless iframe. To do this I wrote a minimal web-page that mimics the general structure of a Wordpress blog, it basically loads the CSS, sets a few structural divs, and that's it. This div in turn includes a minimal web page that contains the content of the blog entry, encapsulated in a single div that needs to be emulated.