Overflow hidden and Flash content in IE 8

Question

Hi there,

I'm building a Flash banner ad to be displayed on a client's site. When the user hovers over the ad, the Flash movie expands by increasing the height and width of the flash object.

The problem is that the client is using overflow:hidden all over their site, and my banner ad is contained within a div that is styled with overflow:hidden.

When the flash movie expands it gets clipped. This only happens in IE 8, all other browsers (at least IE 7 and FF) do not clip the flash movie. I tried explicitly using wmode=window but that doesn't seem to do anything. Maybe IE 8 is being standards compliant and doing the right thing here, but I just need this to work!

Any ideas on how to get the flash content to expand out of the div without changing the styles (not sure what would happen if I changed the overflow:hidden style on the client's site).

Thanks!

Answer 1

Hi, you cannot do it without changing the style. The way banner ads work is that they use Flash and Javascript to trigger the change in styles. So you would have two styles, one of the collapse and another for the expanded states, Flash would make the call to the Javacript and it would change the style.

Answer 2

To isolate the banner's style from the rest of the site, you might try putting it in an iframe with a 0px border. The trick is that then the iframe has to big enough to accommodate the expanding flash object.