Smart systems piss me off. Right now, I can't decide whether to be pissed at DoubleClick or Adobe right now for their SHITTY implementation of Flash ads.

DekiWiki makes a lot of use of inline popup divs, so there's some work being done with z-indexed layers ... which doesn't play very nice with Flash:

See the overlap? Here's the offending HTML:

<div id="DIV_20476501_11179448995515" style="position: static; visibility: visible; z-index: 999999;"<<embed alt="Click Here!" id="FLASH_20476501_11179448995515" src="..." quality="high" bgcolor="#" wmode="window" name="FLASH_20476501_11179448995515" swliveconnect="TRUE" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" height="600" width="160"<</div<<script src="http://m1.2mdn.net/879366/globalTemplate_17_17.js" language="JavaScript"<</script<

Not only does DoubleClick have the nerve to send in wmode="window" (setting wmode="transparent" tends to solve this problem) ... but the div they send back has a z-index off 999999.

I understand there's no "best practices" for z-index, but this seems like a pretty shitty implementation ... some engineer decided, "Hey, ads are most important! Screw the presentation of the page that this exists!"

Fortunately, I've written some Javascript that loads in once that content loads and converts any wmodes and strips away any z-index foolishness... seems to work, except in a few cases (which I still haven't nailed down).

I hate DoubleClick, and I *really* hate Adobe.

Posted by roy on May 17, 2007 at 05:48 PM in Web Development | 2 Comments

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ben mappen (guest)

Comment posted on May 18th, 2007 at 05:36 AM
I wish I knew what the hell you were talking about. haha.
Comment posted on May 18th, 2007 at 02:42 AM
i've encounted a couple of webpages where their pop-up flash ads rendered the whole page virtually mouse-illiterate (unclick-able) after i filtered the ads with firefox's adblock. i had to tab through all the links, so in the end, i was forced to leave the ads on. i wonder if it's intended genius on the programmer's part or they're just plain not-very-good.

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