God, I sincerely hope the stupid chimp was who wrote the layer handling for Netscape 4 has either 1) learned how to program or 2) gone back to waiting tables and isn’t inflicting more pain on the world. I’ve wasted an hour tediously debugging a page layout because ‘document.write’ was blowing up in an absolutely positioned div. DOCUMENT.WRITE! Good lord.
The problem? Turns out, that although elements within an absolutely positioned div somewhat respect the z-index, both background rendering and event capture (the click-plane) don’t, and instead are laid down in document order. Don’t ask me how this interaction barfs with document.write but not static content, I have no frickin’ clue how something could be this badly written.
I’m sure this has been documented somewhere before, but frickin’ A. It’s disgusting.
(not even going to talk about why absolute divs were necessary in the first place because of other NS4 shortcomings — this is why doing front-end work drives me batty)