Ignore Mouse Interaction On Overlay Image

I have a menu bar with hover effects, and now I want to place a transparent image with a circle and a 'handdrawn' text over one of the menu items. If I use absolute positioning to

Solution 1:

The best solution I've found is with CSS Styling:

#reflection_overlay {
    background-image:url(../img/reflection.png);
    background-repeat:no-repeat;
    width: 195px;
    pointer-events:none;
}

pointer-events attribute works pretty good and is simple.

Solution 2:

So I did this and it works in Firefox 3.5 on Windows XP. It shows a box with some text, an image overlay, and a transparent div above that intercepts all clicks.

<divid="menuOption"style="border:1px solid black;position:relative;width:100px;height:40px;">
sometext goes here.
<!-- Place image inside of you menu bar link --><imgid="imgOverlay"src="w3.png"style="z-index:4;position:absolute;top:0px;left:0px;width:100px;height:40px;" \><!-- Your link here --><ahref="javascript:alert('Hello!')" ><divid="mylinkAction"style="z-index:5;position:absolute;top:0px;left:0px;width:100px;height:40px;"></div></a></div>

What I've done: I've crafted a div and sized it to be what a menu option could be sized to, 100x40px (an arbitrary value, but it helps with illustrating the sample).

The div has an image overlay, and a link overlay. The link contains a div sized to be the same as the 'menuOption' div. This way a user click is captured across the whole box.

You will need to provide your own image when testing. :)

Caveat: If you expect your menu button to respond to the user interaction (for example, changing color to simulate a button), then you will need extra code attached to the javascript you will invoke on the tag, this extra code could address the 'menuOption' element through the DOM and change it's color.

Also, there is no other way I know of that you can take a click event, and have it register on an element underneath a visible page element. I've tried this as well this summer, and found no other solution but this.

Hope this helps.

PS: The writeup on events at quirksmode went a long way to help me understand how events behave in browsers.

Solution 3:

Give the button a higher z-index property than the hand-drawn image:

<imgsrc="hand_drawn_image.gif"style="z-index: 4"><ahref="#"style="z-index: 5"></a>

however, make sure you test it in all major browsers. IE interprets z-index differently from FF. For somebody to come up with more details, you would have to post more info, a link would be best.

Solution 4:

Building on what Pekka Gaiser said, I think the following will work. Taking his example and reworking it:

<ahref="#"style="z-index: 5"><!-- Place image inside of you menu bar link --><imgsrc="hand_drawn_image.gif"style="z-index: 4"><!-- Your link here --></a>

Here you should be able to place an event on the underlying a-tag and, unless your image has an event, initiates a capture (!IE browsers) and then kills propagation of the event.

If you need a bit more help, let us know a bit more about the situation.

Solution 5:

If the image will be statically positioned, you can capture the click event from the image as it bubbles up, by placing the img tag inside the menu item element.

<divonclick="menuclick()"><imgsrc="overlay.png"style="position:absolute;" /></div>