Velocity Reviews - Flash links not working over iFrame area in Firefox

Sura wrote:
> I have a flash interactive window which has html links and this
> appears on an html page. This window can be moved with the mouse on
> the html page. The html page has an iFrame too. When the flash window
> comes above the iframe area the html links stop working. Yet the links
> remain active when the flash window is outside the iFrame area. This
> problem is coming in Firefox, but running fine in IE.
> If anybody has any solution, please share.
> Thanks
> Sura

That's one of several limitation of Flash on Firefox which is
acknowledged on various Adobe support pages. No doubt you're using Flash
with wmode=transparent or even wmode=opaque. You might not have noticed
yet, but things will be even worse in Safari. There are a few
workarounds, none of them are nice, but it beats serving Firefox with a
lesser experience.

One is to switch to wmode=window for Firefox. I imagine that you need
the transparency though, so we'll ignore that for now.

Another is to actively hide the iframe as you move over it. Each time
you move the DIV your Flash is on, look at all the iframe objects on the
page and just do some intersection math to determine if you're over it.
If you are, then you hide it. As you stop intersecting (or hide your
DIV) then you make it visible again. This can also be necessary if your
transparent flash finds itself over another flash object with
wmode=window, or if you move over a HTML select dropdown menu. All of
these things can bleed through your Flash, and they do it more on
Firefox and even more on Safari.

Another option is to create an iframe mask. You create an extra DIV
layer with the same position as the one your Flash is on, except this
has a z-index one lower than yours. On this new div you set the
background color to white and put an iframe tag on it with src="". This
iframe div will block the iframe that you're seeing bleed through your
Flash. Simply move this div as you move your own Flash div. It will
block out the nasty bleedthru objects that were bothering you. Of course
this itself is a big white rectangle, so can spoil your transparency
(although you never said you were running wmode=transparent, so it might
still be an option). Even if you are running in transparent mode, you
might be able to customize the size of this div (or have multiple divs)
so that your links aren't affected. I've tried creating a transparent
iframe mask but it doesn't work. The iframe masking only works when the
DIV is white, and it has an iframe tag on it.

A final option is to have an image object (using a fully transparent
GIF) which is on an extra DIV with a higher z-index than your Flash. It
can use the usemap tag of the IMG to catch clicks and do the appropriate
action.

Sorry if you want to follow up on any of these points, I'm just about to
unsubscribe from this newsgroup.

~dd