Any way to display some heavily-styled HTML in isolation from the rest of site's styles?

Question

I am trying to figure out a way to display an archive of email newsletters on my client's site. The issue is that the newsletters are full of a zillion inline styles, which is great for seeing them in Outlook or wherever, but they're not looking too hot in an otherwise-nicely styled site.

My goal is for my client to be able to copy the entire source code of a generated newsletter (which her list management company* gives her access to) and paste it into the CMS (drupal, if it makes a difference).

*Constant Contact? Mail Chimp? I forget. One of those.

Then I'd like to display it on her site, inside the basic structure (header, nav, etc) of the rest of the site. If this was 1997, I'd say "iframes!" and be done with it, but A) that seems like a lame solution, and B) the code doesn't actually exist on a page by itself, which I think is required for iframes.

Is there some kind of tag I can put around this block of HTML to isolate it from the rest of the site's styles? Or is there another way to go about this entirely?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Is there a reason why you can't use a modal? That would allow you to force a new request and make the page render how you'd want it to by not applying your general stylesheet while at the same time keeping your user on the desired page. Of course, it doesn't display the element inline so-to-speak, but it's nearly functionally equivelent.

Answer 2

IFrames are the only way to go that I've ever been able to find. The only alternative to this would be to override every style in the parent page's CSS for the newsletter display area.

As you noted, using an iframe will probably require you to host the newsletters in an independent file. The only alternative to this that I'm aware of is that you can use JavaScript to dynamically create and/or populate the iframe.

If you go with this method, you could have the newsletter present in a div with a specific class, and then use JavaScript to move the div into an iframe. The big downside being that this wouldn't happen for users without JavaScript enabled.

Answer 3

Cutting and pasting raw HTML presents too many security problems, in my opinion. Never trust user's input. Even when the content is entirely benign, next week the designer of newsletter might decide to change their formatting or incorporate some javascript and you'll be responsible for anything that might go wrong.

Therefore I would implement a parser that would drop anything but the content part and leave only b, a, h*, blockquote and similar simple elements, like the ones allowed in forum posts, as well as their styles. After that, you can display it as a normal post in a CMS. I don't see any reason why that should look differently.

As for how to isolate that from your other CSS, you don't really need to if you are careful that all of CSS rules of your CMS apply to elements with specific classes. Alternatively, do a CSS reset for your posts:

.post p {
     margin: 0;
     ... 
.post /* all the standard CSS reset rules preceded with .post */

and then

<div class="post"> content parsed from your CMS </div>