Facebook iFrame application using Facebook style sheet

3
votes

I am working on a Facebook iFrame application, and have a question about styling.

I want the application content to look like the rest of facebook. So the most obvious approach I could think of was to use a stylesheet provided by Facebook for application development that includes such styles. However I cannot seem to find anything about this on developers.facebook.com or any other site for that matter.

I have created some FBML application earlier, and these was able to use Facebook styles directly since the application content was rendrered within the facebook pages. But iframes does not inherit the stylesheet from the parent content (nor should they), so I was wondering how (or possibly if) this can be done.

I have found some posts/blogs that simply tells you to create an application stylesheet that mimics the Facebook look. But I don't think this is a very good idea, as this CSS must be updated every time anything changes on Facebook. It also seems that all facebook wiki pages regarding CSS (which I have used before) has been removed.

The reason I do not want to use FBML Canvas is that Facebook is in the process of deprecating this approach. They recommend new applications to be created using iframes.

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fbml/

I really hope anyone has any good ideas on this.

1
cssfacebook

1 Answers

1
votes

There is no official way. For some reason, FB shards their styles to a ridiculous degree. They also change the filename rather than appending a version parameter every time they make a change to prevent downstream caching. Here's an example of todays stylesheets:

http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/y-/r/40PDtAkbl8D.css
http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yE/r/u7RMVVYiOcY.css
http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yT/r/P-HsvhlyVjJ.css
http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yT/r/CFyyRO05F0N.css
http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/y0/r/k00rCIzSCMA.css
http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yv/r/BJI6bizfXHL.css
http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yD/r/rmbhh_xQwEk.css
http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yn/r/xlsrXFt9-vD.css
http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yN/r/Uuokrl6Xv3c.css
http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/y0/r/klTGALEjWM8.css
http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yN/r/mlYhlJwnCdr.css
http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yT/r/uFI2FW2LitH.css
http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yh/r/5Bzj1255G1S.css
http://b.static.ak.fbcdn.net/rsrc.php/yp/r/5UteuBI1b8_.css

You can automate this process fairly easily using either PHP or .NET using existing solutions Minify and Combiner respectively.

A simpler method would be to use the Web Developer toolbar for Firefox, go to Facebook and choose the Web Developer toolbar option to "view CSS" which will bunch all the CSS up for you. Copy and paste it into your own local stylesheet and you only have to update when Facebook makes a major change.

So while there is no simple way (that I am aware of), there are methods for you take care of it in a fairly speedy manner.