Recently I wrote an article about the Google Adsense problem with page load blocking and than the solution was simple and elegant. You must put your ad in a separate .html file and to include it into your page with an iframe. That gives the page the ability to “breath” and to load faster.

You can see the entire article here.

When everything’s OK, wait for the IE

Yes as usual every browser loaded the iframe correclty, except … IE. Both 6 and 7. What was the problem of that lovely browser? Just as I mentioned in my previous article, I put the Google generated code chunk in a .html file and include it with an iframe.

So far so good. But was actually stoped in on IE. All the developer plugins of IE were incapable of helping me.

Finally the solution

The solution itself is so strange and stupid. The file you include your ad banner should be named “index”. If you have three ads on your page, and three iframes you must include three index.html files, obviously from different directories. That finally made IE working as the other world.

Although the SWFObject method – createSWF is working fine under IE sets the wmode not to be transparent but with the strange value of window, i.e. <PARAM name=”WMode” value=”Window” />

The Solution is …

to replace the createSWF method calls with other SWFObject method – embedSWF. There you can simply describe the desired wmode for the flash.

When the HSlider is set up with two or more thumbs there’s a gap between them always. The problem is that you may want to put them on one single value of the slider, but it’s not possible.

First: hide your thumbs

The quick solution is to make custom skin for the thumbs, setup the height and width of the thumb to be 1px and make a transparent background image for skinning them. That of course does not solve the problem. There’s still gap of 1 value between the thumbs, and still you cannot select one single value with both of them.

Make your own thumbs

It’s difficult to make the calculation and positioning of course. With that approach you’ve to be careful with the math to adjust properly the new thumbs. They can be some kind of Flex built in component. As the button control is or whatever.

Hope for workaround

As it appears there’s a reported bug for this issue. And I hope soon there will be a workaround or even better there’s going to be new version. Something I don’t like in commercial software.

Well it may look strange to want to do that exaclty. Who wants to have a <a> tag in another. It really looks semanticaly incorrect, but however, every normal A grade browser’s displaing it correctly, except .. IE6.

The Case

The Microsoft team may be too much semanticaly involved in that problem, I should guess, but that’s really impossible.

The Workaround

The workaround is trivial. You just put the <a> tags one after another and adjust them with relative position and margin with negative values.

… and The Example

<a href=”#”>link here</a>

<a href=”#” style=”margin:-10px 0 0; position : relative;”>link there</a>

<param name="wmode" value="transparent" />

Why flash does not work correctly with Flash ExternalInterface see here:

• IE ExternalInterface communication problem

How to write object tag to make your IE browser work I’ve written here:

• HTML object and embed tags/ – (part 1)
• object & embed tags revealed – (part 2)