Proxying a site to be able to WYSIWYG edit in iframe
CONTEXT
I'm looking to create a WYSIWYG editor that allows users to edit a third party site loaded within an iframe. I know the companies such as Optimizely use proxying to accomplish this (as described here) but I don't quite understand how this works. In particular, this part is somewhat unclear:
The Optimizely Editor loads http://www.mypage.com inside an iframe and uses window.postMessage to communicate with the page. This only works if that page already has a snippet like the one above on it. If that's not the case, the editor will timeout while waiting for a message from the iframe'd page, and will load it again via a proxy that actually inserts the snippet onto the page.
QUESTION
What exactly does proxying do that allows a JS snippet to be inserted into the page and for the user to edit otherwise uneditable content loaded in iframe?
Given:
If:
Then the same origin policy prevents Bob's client side code from reaching Carol's site.
When you use a proxy however:
Now the iframe either: