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Currently the frameborder attribute for iframe is marked "entirely obsolete, and must not be used by authors". However, this conformance demand is impractical, because there is no way to remove the iframe border in Internet Explorer without using this attribute. The proffered advice to "use CSS" is sadly ineffective in the case of the market leading browser, and consequently will not address the use case of iframes with invisible borders for most authors. Therefore, in order to make it practical to produce interoperable conforming documents that contain iframes without visible borders, the frameborder attribute should be allowed.
A similar rationale applies to the allowTransparency attribute. It is apparently the only way to achieve transparent backgrounds in iframe elements in IE.
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document: http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html Status: Rejected Change Description: no spec change Rationale: By the time the spec is done, this will be a long-solved problem, if the direction of IE9 previews is any indication.
(In reply to comment #2) > Rationale: By the time the spec is done, this will be a long-solved problem, if > the direction of IE9 previews is any indication. I disagree ; By the time this spec is done, there will still be a lot of Internet Explorer < 9 in the wild, especially considering that it's only available on Windows Vista and 7 and *not* XP. These attributes, while clearly useless in standards-abiding browsers, are the only way to achieve clean iframes in those old IE versions. They are already understood by browsers, and, like Bill Lipa said, would help web authors to produce interoperable confirming documents. There is no way to avoid them, marking them as entirely obsolete only force authors to make invalid documents.
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document: http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html Status: Rejected Change Description: no spec change Rationale: On the timescale we are talking about, IE9 will be obsolete by the time the spec is done, let alone IE8. Seriously, it's going to be a decade or so before this spec is done.