How can I control what the mouse cursor reacts to on the page?

A mouse cursor focus problem

[nightva]

I created some list based CSS-driven drop down menus.

As the menus cascade out they overlap a text area on a different part of the page. When this occurs and I move the mouse to hover over one of the links that overlaps the text area, the cursor changes to a text caret and the focus moves to the text UNDERNEATH the menu...thus making the menus disappear.

This happens in FireFox and Netscape but not in IE or Opera. I would expect the problem browsers to be reversed...

Can anyone give me a clue as to how to keep the focus on the menus and not the text area underneath the menus? I can give you the code if that helps.

Nathan

[nightva]

Does someone at least know whats going on in this situation?

If I had a clue, I might be on to something.

Nathan

[nightva]

SuzyUK? DrDoc? Any help on this one? The problem seems very complex....

Help?

Nathan

[mincklerstraat]

Perhaps one reason that no one has yet answered is because, like you say, this can be 'complex'. Not being a css genious, in this situation I'd check your cascade and make sure that everything's hovered that needs to be, not only the parent link items, but also like this:
li ul li a:hover {
in the case you're using the list-inside-a-list technique.

If this still doesn't work, or you don't get more help, then I'd just redo the html / css according to the 'tried and true' suckerfish dropdown scheme - you can google for this.

[SuzyUK]

Nathan, the code might help..

I think it's a z-index problem, making sure the <li> elements and thus the <a>nchor elements inside them have a higher z-index that the content behind it should help, and if I remember rightly from one example I did the a:hover itself needed the z-index set on it, that was for a vertical menu..

Sorry, that's a bit vague, if you strip the code and take out the menu part (is it vertical or horizontal?) only and put that code in here.. we could take it from there, the reason it's complex could be to do with relative/absolute positioning of other content divs which will affect the menu depending on it's position in the source code...

Suzy

[nightva]

Thank you!

Just your replies gave me some valuable clues. It might be the source code arrangement. I appreciate the clues and if I still cant solve it, I'll repost with my findings.

Nathan