Facebook Cookbook

Categories of FBML Tags

Problem

There sure are a lot of FBML tags! Surely there must be some way to group them together to make some sense out of them.

Solution

Damn skippy! There sure is. FBML tags can be organized into types based on their intended use:

• Social (tags that leverage or expose the social graph, such as fb:name)

• Sanitization (tags that sanitize potentially insecure or dangerous content, such as fb:swf)

• Design (tags that provide Facebook-style elements much more easily than building the HTML, such as fb:tabs)

• Component (tags that provide actual user interface widgets, such as fb:comments)

• Control (tags that control what gets displayed on your page, such as fb:visible-to-owner)

The other way to slice and dice is based on the area of functionality they affect (see all of the tags grouped this way on http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/FBML):

• Dialog (display a Facebook-style dialog, either pop-up or contextual)

• Editor display (display a Facebook-style form with labels)

• Embedded media (embed media such as Flash, Silverlight, MP3s, etc.)

• Forms (enable images or text links to act as form submission controls)

• Message/Wall attachments (preview attachments to messages or Wall posts)

• Misc (things that don’t fit somewhere else)

• Notifications and requests (content for the Notification and Request integration points)

• Page navigation (navigation widgets, including dashboards and tabs)

• Profile-specific (FBML that works only in Profile Boxes)

• Status messages (display Facebook-style errors and ...