Positioning HTML Elements w/ Applets, Plugins, and OS Controls

Currently I am working on a project that requires the use of Java Applets as data controls. One of the customer requirements was that they click on a button and get additional details about the what they are currently viewing. That part was accomplished easily with CSS and JavaScript. But I thought it would be very cool if they could reposition the details table wherever they wanted it on the page. So I spent some time getting the script to work and finally I got it finished. But I had a huge problem, the java applets still were showing on top of everything else. I spent some time playing around with z-index, trying to get my details table to float on top of the applets. Finally I turned to my best friend ‘Google’ and found a great article that I wish i would have found before starting.

This article was originally written in September of 1998, close to four years ago. Since then many new versions of NS and IE have appeared on all platforms. Completely new browsers like Opera and Konqueror are steadily being adopted by many users. Unfortunately, the problems originally discussed in this article still exist, although possibly not to the degree that they did back then. DHTML authoring has grown exponentially in this time, so a review and update of the problem seems warranted.

You can read the rest of the article at webreference.com. I hope this saves someone else several hours of wasted effort.