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Putting things over flash (i.e. Drop downs)

→ Posted by: Tim Southcombe on the: 18 Sep 2006

Every time I've seen someone put something (in this case a CSS drop down menu over flash) it's filled me with no small sense of awe. In the past I've quickly tried to do it in using z-index - it's worked great in Firefox or Safari but never in IE. I stupidly rushed to the conclusion that it's just an IE quirk and there'd be an ugly javascript work around.

A recent project though focused my mind on finding a solution. The design had numerous flash areas mixed in with conventional mark-up. From the illustration you can see that it called for a drop down menu to run right over the top of two of them.

Yikes! So settling down for a long Google session to find the solution I wondered just how long it would take. Would it be the never-ending needle-in-the-haystack experience or a truly Damascus road encounter?

Fortunately it was the latter (one query), and the presented solution so easy I felt like a complete wally:

<param name="wmode" value="transparent">

And not only that - it was also the solution to making flash appear transparent over items behind it.

Thus the moral of the story - not everything to do with the web is a painful mash of opinions that has produced technologies impossible to use. It appears that in this case, someone thought about how flash was going to be used and offered a reasonable solution to get it doing just what you want it to.

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Comment on: 6 June 2007 - 14:20:12

Perfect, I've been bugged by this for some time now. Thanks for putting this out! It works a treat. One extra bit of code seems to be required...where DW adds in the script for flash... You need to declare teh 'wmode' and 'transparent' AC_FL_RunContent( 'wmode', 'transparent', 'codebase','https://download.macromedia.com

Julian Parkinson wrote

Comment on: 6 June 2007 - 14:20:12

Thanks for that extra tip Julian, will add that in!

Tim wrote

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