Pulling Content From Other Sites

General Best Practices

The ability to pull in information from other online sources is very powerful, but the way we display it on the website can have a big impact on accessibility, usability, performance, and integrity.

For these reasons, we generally discourage the use of Inline Frames and Javascript for displaying information, and each instance of these will be reviewed by the web team.

Some Good Uses of Embedded Content

1. Redistributing a service from a government entity.
2. Providing access to widely used services like maps and weather.
3. Presenting the information cannot be done in any other way.

Javascript

Some websites and applications provide embeddable Javascript code to display things like buttons, updates, and other data. This code is always between two <script> tags.

Accessibility

1. Depending on browser type and browser settings, some people are not able to see things produced by Javascript.
2. Since we have little control over the content and formatting of things embedded using Javascript, we have no guarantee that it will be presented in an accessible manner.

Usability

1. The look and feel of embedded data is often very different, which disrupts the consistent experience for our users.

Performance

1. If the site we are pulling information from goes down for some reason, your page will load very slowly while it waits for the other site to respond.

Integrity

1. We do not have control over information pulled in from another source. This can result in incorrect or unwanted things being displayed on your page.

Inline Frames

Some websites and applications provide embeddable Inline Frame code to display things like buttons, updates, and other data. This code is always between two <iframe> tags.

Inline Frames simply display another web page inside an embedded window on your own page.

Accessibility

1. Some screen readers do not read Inline Frames by default, so users wouldn't even know that content was there.

Usability

1. The look and feel of embedded data is often very different, which disrupts the consistent experience for our users.
2. Depending on the size of the output, it can be very cumbersome for users to see all of the information inside the frame.

Performance

1. If the website you are embedding on your page goes down, or is moved to another location, there will be a big lag in loading times.
2. If the page you are embedding is resource-intensive, the user will have to wait for both your page to load, and the embedded page.

Integrity

1. We do not have control over information pulled in from another source. This can result in incorrect or unwanted things being displayed on your page.