I sent a note to the Sakai UI and dev lists for folks to take a look at my new frameset portal branch.
I put a copy of the note here as well.

Over the Holidays, I made a branch to add a frameset feature to Sakai so that tools such as the iFrame tool, SCORM Player and IMS Tools Interoperability can request that they be displayed with minimal navigation – in particular the left navigation goes away. The advantage of using a frame set is that no matter what content is displayed in the content frame – there is never more than one scrollbar.
I have this described in JIRA as
http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/jira/browse/SAK-12402
Eventually I will call for a vote to merge this back into trunk in a week or so. But I figured I would let people play with the new feature to see if you can find ways to improve it before I call for the merge vote.
I have attached documentation on the feature that you can peruse – when I do the merge – this documentation will be put into the reference section of Sakai. I will also update the properties document as well.
I have a server that has the new code running if you want to test it.
http://samovar.dmc.dc.umich.edu:8080/portal/
Login as admin / admin
Click on aliases – it should display in a frameset
Click on My Workspace – it should display left navigation
Click on Aliases again
Click on “New Alias”
Then Click on the Aliases top tab – it should reset back to the initial alias screen
If the server is down – send me a note – it is just a desktop so it is a bit flakey. The Sakai on this server has frameset navigation turned on for *all tools* – this is *not* normal – but it *does* demonstrate how one would move from tool to tool when lots of tools are requesting minimal navigation. Note that pages with two tools (like Home) will never display maximized.
I designed the navigation to be as “not surprising” to existing users as possible. Some tabs disappear but familiar tabs are there and normal clicks on normal tabs do pretty much what one would expect. I am eager to hear comments about how to improve this.
Note that if you don’t like this feature – it can be completely disabled with a property and unless a tool requests maximized view – nothing will change for our users.
All in all this is a great way to give us more options for including external content in things like the Link Tool, IMS TI and simple web content. It makes it so we don’t have to use pop-ups (which in Sakai still have two scrollbars sometimes – yuck) nearly as much.
If you want to check out the code – grab this branch and check it out replacing your portal directory.
https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/portal/branches/SAK-12402/
I already back-ported this to Sakai 2.4 – I don’t yet have this in SVN – but here is a tar file:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~csev/tmp/portal-post-2-4.tar
I did not want to make a branch on top of a branch of a branch until the main stuff looks OK. Back porting portal to 2.4 will be really easy (it was less than an hour for me) – I expect to port the current portal it all the way to 2.3 if there is community interest.
Please let me know what you think – either on the dev list or in the JIRA. In a week or so I will propose a merge vote for this.
Please read the document attached to the JIRA entry – it contains screenshots, describes use cases, user interface design, and how to configure Sakai and how to trigger the feature in tools – the attached document will likely answer most of the first few questions you will have about this feature.