Comments on: Unclickable Links in IE

By: Anton

Anton — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 21:14:48 +0000

I stumbled across this once and ended up fixing it by keeping the background color, but setting “opacity: .0; filter: alpha(opacity=00);” on the tag. It might be a bit invalid, but no spacer gif was needed.

By: Jason Beaird

Jason Beaird — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 18:44:57 +0000

That’s a good workaround for the example, Chris. Unfortunately though, in both of the sites I was working on, the link really needed to be absolutely positioned. It had to be out of the flow of the layout and on top of another object.

By: Chris Harrison

Chris Harrison — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 13:56:43 +0000

Jason, I'm sure you probably have your reasons for using the methods demonstrated in the example. Using relative positioning and a bit of floating could achieve the same effect and works in IE6 & IE7: http://cdharrison.com/sandbox/absolutelinks/

By: Jason Beaird

Jason Beaird — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 23:01:48 +0000

@Paul – That’s it! I’m going back to designing ANSI graphics. :)

@Ove – Of course, and it’s kind of an obscure/irrelevant bug for most folks. I just didn’t find anything in my limited searching so I thought I’d put it out here. I was actually kinda hoping someone would come along and say: “Oh, I’ve seen that a million times. Here’d my blog post from 5 years ago on it.” No luck yet.

By: Ove Klykken

Ove Klykken — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 21:30:39 +0000

Weird.. did some quick debugging.. nothing.
I doubt you found a new IE6 bug though.. someone must have written something about this.

By: Paul Erickson

Paul Erickson — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 21:09:30 +0000

That’s it. I’m going back to using tables and spacer gifs.

Long live DOS 5.0!

(Just kidding.)

By: Jason Beaird

Jason Beaird — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:51:34 +0000

Didn’t think of that, Ken.
And # as the URL of a background validates.

By: Ken Seals

Ken Seals — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:41:33 +0000

Heh, strange one.

Looks like you can just use “background:url(#);” on the link in question. That’ll save you 43 bytes :) … But, it’s probably a safer bet to just use the spacer gif.