Another CSS fiasco
Just when I thought I was almost through with the site prototype, yet another CSS gotcha caught me.
It's a trivial flaw, actually: see, embedded Flash does not cooperate with CSS positioning. No matter how deep the value I add to the
I haven't explored this problem deeply -- haven't got the time: crunch time is less than two days away -- but I think this is similar to another layer-bleed problem that occurs with
Well, why use Flash at all? I mean, I could just replace it with a static image, and it would work sweetly, but that's not really what I want to accomplish, either. The Flash thingy is there to serve as a hook to the page. I'm talking about unsophisticated(?) users here whose attention spans I have to lengthen so they'd go over the rest of the page and take a look. The content is rich enough, I know, but without a visual target on which they can focus their attention at a glance, I would have lost them. Good design is when one knows how to use the appropriate tools at the right time. I can be quite dogmatic about my sticking to a standards-based design, but if I could squeeze in a few more bytes to make the site more visually enticing, so be it. But I know when not to overuse it, though -- there'll still be a lo-res image substitute to the Flash content.
Oh, well. Gotta refurbish the site. Good thing I have other templates on the ready. This is the most wonderful thing about standards-based web design: with the separation of form, structure and content, I can change the look without touching one piece of the semantically valid content. This is my reward for thinking about standards from day one of the development phase.
It's a trivial flaw, actually: see, embedded Flash does not cooperate with CSS positioning. No matter how deep the value I add to the
z-index property, the Flash element always bleeds over other HTML elements that overlap with it on the page. (See screenshot below.)
I haven't explored this problem deeply -- haven't got the time: crunch time is less than two days away -- but I think this is similar to another layer-bleed problem that occurs with
select elements. Although I could place the Flash content in its own horizontal layer without any adjacent layers that will overlap it (like the popup menu I'm using for the site), that would result in real estate coverage for the Flash content larger than I would have preferred.Well, why use Flash at all? I mean, I could just replace it with a static image, and it would work sweetly, but that's not really what I want to accomplish, either. The Flash thingy is there to serve as a hook to the page. I'm talking about unsophisticated(?) users here whose attention spans I have to lengthen so they'd go over the rest of the page and take a look. The content is rich enough, I know, but without a visual target on which they can focus their attention at a glance, I would have lost them. Good design is when one knows how to use the appropriate tools at the right time. I can be quite dogmatic about my sticking to a standards-based design, but if I could squeeze in a few more bytes to make the site more visually enticing, so be it. But I know when not to overuse it, though -- there'll still be a lo-res image substitute to the Flash content.
Oh, well. Gotta refurbish the site. Good thing I have other templates on the ready. This is the most wonderful thing about standards-based web design: with the separation of form, structure and content, I can change the look without touching one piece of the semantically valid content. This is my reward for thinking about standards from day one of the development phase.
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