Affects: IE6, IE7
Fixed in: IE8 Beta 1
The css
"position:absolute" property works well to position a block element in an exact location on screen. However reader Xogede pointed out to us that there are scenarios where IE displays the element correctly, but it doesn't fire events on the element unless the event was triggered on the "text" portion inside the element.To see this in action, save the code below and open it up in IE6 or IE7. If you click on the text, the onclick event fires and you'll see an alert. If you click anywhere else inside the DIV no event will fire. I've set the cursor to "pointer" so that you can see exactly where the event will fire, but it will turn to the default arrow anywhere that the event firing will fail. Load it up in any other browser and you can click anywhere in the DIV to fire the event.
Example:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>bug 229 - not everything is absolute in IE</title>
</head>
<body>
<div style="position:absolute;cursor:pointer;top:10px;left:10px;width:200px;border:1px solid black;height:50px;" onclick="alert('Clicked!')">Absolute</div>
</body>
</html>
What is truly odd about this bug, is that it happens in Standards Mode (you know, the one that is supposed to be "closest" to the specs).
The good news is, that this bug can be fixed. All you need to do is specify a background color, e.g. just add this to the DIV's style attribute:
"background-color:#ffffff;"Known Workarounds: One. Set a background color.
Example Workaround Code:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<title>bug 229 - not everything is absolute in IE</title>
</head>
<body>
<div style="position:absolute;cursor:pointer;top:10px;left:10px;width:200px;border:1px solid black;height:50px;background-color:#fffedf;" onclick="alert('Clicked!')">Absolute</div>
</body>
</html>
Related Issues: None.
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