Anchor Link not clickable over Flash

Recently I came across an Internet Explorer bug with anchors not being clickable when absolutely positioned over Flash banners. I've found a solution.

Sometimes you may need want to make a Flash banner clickable without setting variables within the Flash itself. One way of doing this is to position the Flash object within a div and then layer a transparent anchor tag over it using z-index and absolute positiiong to completely cover the Flash.

Whilst this approach appears to work in most browsers, all versions of IE from 6-9 have a major bug - the link becomes unclickable!

The Solution

It's seems that setting a background value to anything other than "transparent" or "none" forces the link to become clickable. However if you want the anchor to remain visually hidden then this is not an acceptable solution.

My fix is to use a 1x1 pix gif and set it as the background-image with background-position values of -1px for both horizontal and vertical. This fixes the bug. Phew!

Really hope this saves someone a lot of time.

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