Displaying an external page using your own stylesheet

Spyhop · 30 Nov 2008 at 15:58

Hi - Does anyone know if it is possible (and how) to display a page from an external server using a stylesheet of your choosing rather than the one actually used?

e.g.

User clicks http://banana.com/consumers/
User is presented with the page from http://monkey.com/types/ using a stylesheet chosen by banana.com's admin, instead of the stylesheet actually used on http://monkey.com/types/.

I've not had much luck searching because there are many ways to word the question. Can this be done using javascript?

MikeHunt79 · 30 Nov 2008 at 16:21

I think the best way of doing something like this would be thru greasemonkey?

Spyhop · 30 Nov 2008 at 17:43

Isn't that a personal plugin? I mean making every visitor of banana.com see it that way.

Looking in to this still - would the best way be to put the external page in an iframe - then use javascript to do a search and replace of href="http://monkey.com/style.css" with href="http://banana.com/style.css" within the iframe's content at runtime?

Do browsers automatically 'refresh' in-memory 'pages' when you modify their source code at runtime? Bare in mind I know very little about web development

Augmented · 30 Nov 2008 at 19:52

wush said:
Looking in to this still - would the best way be to put the external page in an iframe - then use javascript to do a search and replace of href="http://monkey.com/style.css" with href="http://banana.com/style.css" within the iframe's content at runtime?

You can't access across frames/domains with javascript, so this isn't possible.

t31os · 1 Dec 2008 at 01:55

You could use selectors to over-ride the CSS on the external page, however i'm not how you'd go about including an external page with an iframe or the like, and even then a lot of current sites will automatically break out of frames.

Assuming you get it to load inside the iframe or something else you could include a stylesheet along with it that has the necessary CSS selectors to over-ride the exteral page's CSS.

Dj_Jestar · 1 Dec 2008 at 02:01

Use PHP to fetch a data feed (x(ht)ml) and tack on the style sheet of choice.

However, can you please explain what's going on so that I can be sure if I should be frowning?

RickST · 1 Dec 2008 at 12:30

as above, Use a server side http request to pull in the content and reskin with your own css. you can even use regex etc to remove <head> content. however, and this is a big however, you should not be using this method to steal or use another sites content without permission.

if you have permission there are better ways of getting the data to your site.

Spyhop · 1 Dec 2008 at 20:28

Thanks guys. I used the domains as an example - it's not for use the the public internet, so I'm not looking to nab someone's bandwidth / content!