Was reminded of oEmbed stuff recently; see bug 25854 for adding an oEmbed provider to MediaWiki.

It would also be useful in some situations to embed oEmbed-able resources from foreign sites. Simplest implementation would probably be as a parser function:

{{#oembed:http://www.flickr.com/photos/brionv/5730494932/in/photostream}}

or to set an embedding size:

{{#oembed:http://www.flickr.com/photos/brionv/5730494932/in/photostream|400x300px}}

Of course there are difficulties with being a safe oEmbed client:

• embedding foreign HTML without sanitization can be dangerous
• performing sanitzation may remove the interesting bits, like the video player :P

Hosting the embed content on a foreign iframe can work nicely, but this is hard to generalize.

A basic extension should probably do:

• provide a domain whitelist control that can be modified by sysops
• consider allowing photos from any domain? (embedding raw images is safe, but of course is a potential image vandalism vector)
• provide some fairly generic-ish way for a 'serve embed data from alternate domain' setup

This will be easier to do if future oEmbed versions add native iframe URL support to the return data.

See Also:

• T27854 becoming an oEmbed provider