The panel drew its own header and footer in React. It looked plausible and it was wrong — the site's
header has a logo hanging past a rule and a nav in the content column — and worse, it was a second
implementation of the layout, so it would have gone on being wrong differently every time either side
moved.
So the admin embeds the site's own `/layout` route instead: the real shell with no page in it. A
designer changing the header in code changes what the admin shows, with no admin change at all. That
is the bridge.
Proxied through Officer rather than linked, because everything this plugin knows about where the site
lives is loopback — 127.0.0.1:<devPort> and nothing else. There is no public hostname stored anywhere
and adding one would be a second fact about the same thing, kept in step by hand. The request goes the
way every other request here goes, server-side, and the browser talks only to Officer.
Same origin, which is also what keeps the door open: the day the page builder wants to draw handles on
top of the real page, it can. A cross-origin iframe never could.
The rewrite is narrow and its limits are the interesting part. The site writes root-relative URLs and
those resolve against Officer's root inside the iframe; a <base> tag does not help, because it moves
relative URLs and leaves root-relative ones exactly where they were wrong. So href, src, srcset and
CSS url() are moved under the prefix — and `//` is excluded deliberately, because that names another
host and prefixing one would turn it into a path on this server.
Only HTML is rewritten. Stylesheets, fonts and images are returned as they came: rewriting bytes we do
not understand is how a proxy corrupts a font.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
pastilhasandClaude Opus 5
b56c8375c3