The iframe sits inside a div tag. I’m going to experiment with making the div hidden when the menus open if the browser is Opera. Sounds hokey, but maybe it will work.

I changed the logo .gif so that it pauses in between headstands and that seems to help with the blinking cursor. It doesn’t seem to pause correctly in Netscape, but then Netscape doesn’t seem to have the cursor problem either. So I guess I’ll have a go at changing all of the weather icons to stand still for a bit.

I also changed the graphics and display effect on the menus. I like the new graphics, but the display is a bit jerky. I think I’ll change that back.

The good news is that mommymonster.com is now much more “styled” as far as CSS goes. I ran into some strangeness with some of the browsers, but for the most part it all works OK.

I tried out the DHTML scroller and found it not to be a suitable solution. It, and all of the ones I found, work by moving the external page first into an iframe and then moving the iframe contents into a div. Doing so loses all of the header info in the external page. That meant I would have had to move almost all of my pages — including this one — to pop-up windows. Ick, and no thanks.

mommymonster uses iframes and javascript. If you use Opera… oh well. Deal with it.

The browser, that is.

Why can’t Opera behave like a normal browser? I like Opera a lot. I think it’s a great browser. It claims to have the best CSS2 support. It claims.

Opera allows the operating system to draw all inline frames, which means that frames are no longer in the control of the browser, are no longer positioned objects, and are no longer 3-dimensional. So iframes are always on top. Always. And my menus will never work with Opera, because they will always get shoved under the iframe.

In looking at the W3C documentation, it sure looks to me as though iframes should be positioned objects, and z-index should have meaning. IE, Netscape and Firebird all interpret it that way.

According to Opera’s forum, they’re thinking about looking into this in “the future.” And that leave a heck of a lot of iframe-laden web sites out in the cold as far as Opera goes.

I could redesign to get rid of the iframe. But it resizes correctly, degrades nicely and allows for fast page loads. With the amount of graphics on mm, I don’t want to reload every page every time. And I can’t come up with an option that would work as well.

Good thing nobody else comes here. 🙂

I haven’t come up with a solution. I briefly contemplated changing all of the gifs to Flash movies. But the mommy logo would be tough to turn into Flash because of the transparent background. The weather gif is loaded via a php call and an hour of messing around with various calls to various objects couldn’t get it to load right as a .swf vs .gif. Probably because I don’t really know what I’m doing.

While banging my head against the keyboard in frustration, I decided to do one more search for the answer and brought up Yahoo. There was a Flash ad running, and when I put my cursor into the text box to type in my search criteria, my little insertion point flashed like a neon light in Times Square.

I decided I can live with it flashing away on mommymonster.com. There aren’t that many text entry opportunities, nobody else comes here anyway, and I have a short attention span. And it only happens with IE. Mozilla and Opera are handling the insertion point OK without the flashes. Of course, the menus don’t work as well in those…

arrrrrgggggghhhhhh it’s endless

Reasoning that at one time I was a fairly competent programmer and should be able to troubleshoot a little problem like a flashing cursor, I set about having a go at figuring out what was causing the problem.

After tearing a page apart piece by piece until the problem stopped, I came up with the following answer: It happens when a page has been loaded into an iframe on a main page that has an animated graphic.

Curses!

I now go in search of a solution. I might almost be willing to give up my happy little mommy monster logo. But the weather graphic in the upper left corner won’t make nearly as much sense if it isn’t animated.

I suppose the other choice would be to give up iframes. But, darnit, it works well.

So… put your cursor into any text entry box on mommymonster.com — the search box, say, or the guestbook. And the cursor will start to pulse wildly. It’s making me seasick as I write this.

So, what’s going on? I’m pretty sure that it has something to do with DHTML Menu Builder because the pages don’t have the same problem when I load them outside of the iframe. But why the iframe problem, and how do I fix it?

The mysteries of life…