Last time I ran into the problem of Flash’s NavigateToURL being blocked in IE, and the fix was to set wmode. Last night I hit another wmode problem: a text input field in Flash (a genuine TextField in CS4, type=’input’), once embedded in a web page, couldn’t take Chinese input properly in Firefox — the IME worked, but everything typed came out garbled.

Problem description:This afternoon I ran into a hassle: IE7 and IE8 intercept navigateToURL('xxx','_blank') inside Flash; getURL under AS2 gets intercepted the same way. I feel like I’ve run into this before, but it doesn’t happen that often, so I never bothered to dig into what conditions trigger the interception. It came up again today, so it’s a good chance to figure out why. After some searching, I found plenty of discussions from last year. Someone pointed out: IE7 and Firefox (the version I’m using is 2.0.0.11) block opening new windows with the navigateToURL method, while the getURL method in AS2 doesn’t — which is pretty annoying. Since the project chose AS3, we just have to find a way around it. The first thing that comes to mind is ExternalInterface, of course, but testing showed it still gets blocked. Then I wondered whether adding wmode would help, so I added the wmode attribute set to opaque to the page — and sure enough, it worked.

While working on the test-paper composition system today, I ran into a problem: FLASH was covering the floating layer. No matter what I did, it always rendered on top and simply could not coexist with the layer. So I went searching, and finally found a good fix: the key parameter that keeps Flash from blocking floating objects or layers is wmode=opaque. How to do it: for IE, add the parameter inside ; for FF, add the parameter wmode=”opaque” inside .