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.

The other day I had an application where I needed to pull an HTTPRequest from a sub domain. Unfortunately same domain policy kicked in and I couldn’t retrieve the needed information. The other bad thing was that these were static HTML pages as well with no server side ability to get the files.

I did some researching and found no information on how this might be solved, nor did I find any real information on server side techniques either.

The solution to static HTML used the ability of Linux’s cron and wget. I set up a cron job that ran a wget, every hour and copied the page into a new page located within the same domain as the app.

I write this because I would love to have any one who ran into and solved the same type of problem. Even server side solutions are welcome because frankly I didn’t find squat out there.