Yes I mean pull back the curtains on what your site does and how you resolve issues. By doing so you are disclosing to your visitors browser what information you are collecting through your cookies and if there is a problem how the visitor can contact you. By not doing so isn’t going to kill your web site in any fashion nor is there any requirements from anyone to do so as well. What may happen is some visitors may not be able to fully enjoy your site.

Disclosing your privacy policy is known as the

Platform for Privacy Preferences

(P3P) as recommended by the World Wide Consortium in 2002. P3P is a protocol that allows a web site declare the information it collects and how that information is used. This gives the visitors more control of their personal information while browsing the site with a P3P enabled browser (aka User Agent).

With the rampant use of tracking cookies to record demographics and surfing habits many surfers elect to turn of cookies. The P3P enabled User Agent seek to give back cookies to these users and even more control over data collection. The surfer sets their browser to allow this or that type of cookie information collection and from there the browser will either save or reject a web sites cookie based up the web sites P3P policy. P3P enabled User Agent can even show the web sites policy in readable format.

Actually building P3P policies is quite difficult. First there’s the whole explanation from the w3c P3P Reference of what the xml formats are needed. They also provide a validator once you are done P3P Validator. You also need a privacy policy page for your site also explaining what you collect and what you do with that information. There are several websites that you can have the necessary P3P files created and they don’t seem expensive.

Are these P3P important? I don’t know the answer to that as User Agent support seems to be spotty. I do know my site visitors are very important too me and that I want to ensure a good experience. So I have created the necessary files. In this day and age privacy is important and trustworthy sites.

One of the bugs up to and including IE 6 was that the select element offered no z-index control. That meant it bleed through any DHTML element you placed on top of it. This was extremely irritating as sometimes you could not re-arrange your visual template to accomadate this. Finally IE 7 fixed this known bug. But how many people have upgraded to IE 7 yet? Not many so we as designers still need to worry about this.

For this particluar problem I have spents weeks maybe even months throughout several applications trying to find a work around. I’ve created DHTML drop downs that worked well but couldn’t really handle full dynamic programming. Made the drop downs move away, as a whole slew of other solutions. None of which I liked but had to deal with, just as you have to as well.

I was given the answer today and I am opening it to everybody. Use iframes to cover the select and the drop down won’t appear through. Because the select tag is a windowed control is stays inside its window. covering it with another window means that it CAN’T go into the other window. This is BRILLIANT.

So how to make the iframe move with the DHTML area that you want to see? Simple and assuming your using a div tag :). The last child html element of the containing div tag should the iframe with the same width of the parent div. Trust me this works and was absolutely brilliant.

Please Please Please vote for Trevor to go to the Vegas Postie Con. Here’s a direct link to help you!

Vote For Trevor

Thank you for your vote! I know you want to.