I have an absolutely positioned input box in a form. The input box has transparent background:
.form-page input[type="text"] {
border: none;
background-color: transparent;
/* Other stuff: font-weight, font-size */
}
Surprisingly, I cannot select this input box by clicking on it in IE8. It works perfectly in Firefox however. The same happens for background: none
. When I change the background color:
background-color: red;
It works fine, so this is issue associated with transparent background. Setting a border makes the input box selectable by clicking on its border only.
Is there a workaround to have clickable input box with transparent background working in IE8?
Update: Example. Uncomment background-color
and the inputbox is selectable. You can also click on the select box, and focus the input box by pressing Shift+Tab.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html><head></head><body>
<style type="text/css">
input[type="text"] {
border: none;
background: transparent;
/*background-color: blue;*/
}
#elem528 { position:absolute; left:155px; top:164px; width:60px; height:20px; }
#elem529 { position:absolute; left:218px; top:164px; width:40px; height:20px; }
</style>
<img src="xxx.png" alt="" width="1000" height="1000">
<input id="elem528" maxlength="7" type="text">
<select id="elem529"></select>
</body></html>
IE in its infinite wisdom is deciding not to render the item because it thinks there is nothing to render. There are numerous ways to address this but basically you'll need to give IE something to chew on.
Adding a 'value=x' to the input tag itself definitely works. But more than likely it's not the best solution. A simple, color:black (without the focus) allows the element to be tabbed to. Adding ':focus' to the input style allows the element to render.
Try this:
I am unable to reproduce such a problem in IE8. Full test case? Are you sure there's not a layering problem causing some other transparent element to cover the clickable area?
Does setting
background-image
make a difference? What about to a transparent GIF?ETA: Curious! It's actually an IE7 bug. For me, your example exhibits the described behaviour in IE7, but in IE8 it's only when in EmulateIE7 mode; in IE8 native rendering it's fixed. You'll generally want to make sure you don't fall back to IE7 rendering by using a suitable
X-UA-Compatible
header/meta; however, yes, setting thebackground-image
to a transparent GIF fixed the problem for me. Tsk, we still need the blank GIF even in this day and age, huh?You have to define a (transparent) background image.
Just in case someone would be interested. One of suggested workarounds....
Had the similar issue -> IE8 textbox was not editable (when wrapper of my App has position:absolute). Click worked only in the border. Filled with color and transparent also did not work. With the following doctype change the issue is fixed.
Source : http://www.codingforums.com/showthread.php?p=1173375#post1173375
As bobince observed, it's an IE7 bug. I've sometimes found it convenient to solve it by adding a
value=" "
. Use as many non-breaking spaces as required to make the clickable area big enough. Depending on your app, you might need to strip these later.this is an awesome question. I would never have been able to figure out what was going on without this post. My solution though was to use
rgba(0,0,0,0)
instead of transparent gif.