Override body style for content in an iframe

jd6699 picture jd6699 · Jun 27, 2011 · Viewed 501k times · Source

How can I control the background image and colour of a body element within an iframe? Note, the embedded body element has a class, and the iframe is of a page that is part of my site.

The reason I need this is that my site has a black background assigned to the body, and then a white background assigned to divs that contain text. A WYSIWYG editor uses an iframe to embed content when editing, but it doesn't include the div, so the text is very hard to read.

The body of the iframe when in the editor has a class that isn't used anywhere else, so I'm assuming this was put there so problems like this could be solved. However, when I apply styles to class.body they don't override the styles applied to body. The weird thing is that the styles do appear in Firebug, so I've no idea what's going on!

Thanks

UPDATE - I've tried @mikeq's solution of adding a style to the class that is the body's class. This doesn't work when added to the main page's stylesheet, but it does work when added with Firebug. I'm assuming this is because Firebug is applied to all elements on the page whereas the CSS is not applied within iframes. Does this mean that adding the css after window load with JavaScript would work?

Answer

SimpleSam5 picture SimpleSam5 · Dec 19, 2012

The below only works if the iframe content is from the same parent domain.

The following jquery script works for me. Tested on Chrome and IE8. The inner iframe references a page that is on the same domain as the parent page.

In this particular case, I am hiding an element with a specific class in the inner iframe.

Basically, you just append a style element to the head section of the document loaded in a frame:

frame.addEventListener("load", ev =>
    const new_style_element = document.createElement("style");
    new_style_element.textContent = ".my-class { display: none; }"
    ev.target.contentDocument.head.appendChild(new_style_element);
});

You can also instead of style use a link element, for referencing a stylesheet resource.