Design Ontap

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.