Brett Gilbert

The perils of interactive javascript animation

Posted by Brett on Friday, January 20th, 2012

One of the biggest lessons that I have learned when trying to build an interactive, animated element is that while divs are visually transparent – they are not physically.  This means that if you have the following layers:

#container
  #layer1
    #link1
      #image1

  #layer2

even though layer2 is completely transparent – it still overlaps the link making the link un-clickable.

I have been working on a two layer parallaxing effect; each layer has 3 images and 3 clickable items.  This is an example: http://www.jquery4u.com/demos/jquery4u-parallax-demo/  If you tried making the Frog clickable – the Butterfly div would block it.

As a solution – I had to move all clickable elements to a third – top most layer and match up the animation per item.

Definitely not the ideal scenario and a BIG lesson learned.

Posted in: Techie Stuff.

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