Visual Lizard

Ross McDowall

Dwarf

Ross is a senior web developer for Visual Lizard. In working for the company for the past 9 years he has steadily upgraded his skills. Both the best and worst thing about this industry is how fast things change. It is great finding new ways to do things, but in finding the new process, it sometimes means having to go back and redo all of the programming that was done the old way. Thus, he fears change... but since the world is always changing, he nevertheless changes with it. He enjoys working for the company as the small staff doesn’t allow for office politics. The office environment allows for independence, creativity, and quick access to a fairly substantial knowledge base.

Ross enjoys roleplaying games, science fiction and fantasy books, and movies. He has his own website which he uses as a place to experiment with his programming skills from time to time. He has done substantial work on the majority of the sites developed at Visual Lizard, with particular pride in working on Destination Winnipeg, The Forks, IMAX Winnipeg, Folklorama and the Winnipeg Airports Authority.

Ross is learning more about developing online web applications including a more comprehensive version of his own diabetes blood sugar testing recorder. He has honed his skills in both PHP and MySQL as these are the primary tools of his trade. His latest goal is becoming fully familiar with the CAKE framework (not easy as I am not good with change *harrumph harrumph*).

In our industry, the concept of standards for web and browser development should be at the forefront. Competition between browsers should not affect how the viewer sees the product which is being developed. It is up to the web developer to determine how a site should look. The browser should just be the platform to view the site, and should not interpret how to display what is written. Unfortunately the browsers are not quite to that stage yet, so for now we have to make the odd piece of non-compliant code to accommodate those browsers. One day soon maybe we will see all browsers following standards. Cross your fingers.

Flash, CSS z-index and Internet Explorer

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Authored by Ross on Jul 31, 2008

The newest browsers understand how to combine flash and css. The issue of flash always rendering on the top level has been addressed sufficiently, and can now be displayed like any other element by using proper css code.

Except for Internet Explorer.

We came across an issue where our HTML / CSS popup menus were appearing behind a flash object in IE 6 & 7. According to standards, the css and html were correct. This is what we discovered and how it was fixed.

Internet Explorer reads flash in a different manner than the other browsers. Where Firefox, Safari and Camino understand and render the <object> tag with its parameters, Internet Explorer doesn’t acknowledge the <object> tag, and prefers the <embed> tag instead. So while we index items properly in CSS, when it comes to flash, we have to make specific exceptions for flash in Internet Explorer. Follow these rules for proper z-indexing in all browsers.

z-index the tag in which the flash object is contained.
set <param name="wmode" value="opaque" />
for Internet Explorer set the <embed> tag wmode="opaque" !! Important !!
set Internet Explorer stylesheet specific z-index style for the flash embed

Someday Internet Explorer will catch up with standards. Until then we will need to remember these little quirks and how to fix them.

Ross McDowall

Flash, CSS z-index and Internet Explorer

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