textarea problem: keyboard focus doesn't follow mouse focus/click

[kettle]

Hi,

I have a simple web page which is composed of a flash audio player
(jwmp3player) and a form with a textarea box. I have noticed some
very odd behaviour which I cannot puzzle out.

If I click on the flash mp3 player to play an audio file, then try to
click on the textarea and type in some text, I am unable to enter
anything. I can move the cursor around the textarea but the keyboard
focus will not change, as it appears to be stuck on the flash
player.

If I click somewhere else on the page, and then click again on the
textarea, I am then able to enter text. I've repeated this many times
and in different variations and the result is always the same.

I also tried adding an onClick="this.focus();" attribute to the
textarea tag, but this had no effect. For kicks, I then added an
onClick="this.select();" attribute to make sure that the mouse focus
really was being drawn away from the flash player, and this worked as
expected, highlighting any default text, however the only way I am
able to shift the keyboard focus is still to click once on some part
of the page other than the textarea or the flash player.

Any ideas as to what might be causing this bizarre behaviour would be
incredibly helpful as I am pretty much at a loss at this point.

Thanks.

[Jonathan N. Little]

kettle wrote:

Hi,

I have a simple web page which is composed of a flash audio player
(jwmp3player) and a form with a textarea box. I have noticed some
very odd behaviour which I cannot puzzle out.

Great for you! And you want someone to diagnose some vague problem
without actually seeing the page?

--
Take care,

Jonathan
-------------------
LITTLE WORKS STUDIO
http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com

[kettle]

On Jun 13, 11:51 pm, "Jonathan N. Little" <[e-mail]:

kettle wrote:

Hi,

I have a simple web page which is composed of a flash audio player
(jwmp3player) and a form with a textarea box. I have noticed some
very odd behaviour which I cannot puzzle out.

Great for you! And you want someone to diagnose some vague problem
without actually seeing the page?

Actually no, I'm not looking for someone to fix my broken code, so I
apologize for framing my question wrong.

I think that the issue is more basic in that I don't understand how
the focus is controlled by the browser, and more importantly how that
control is handed off to and from embedded objects.

Can a flash object explicitly control the focus of the keyboard such
that one cannot, by keyboard alone, move between the object and the
rest of the page?

Or what, if anything, distinguishes the body of the textarea or form
field from the body of a webpage. That is, all things being equal,
with no javascript or other cleverness, why should clicking on a
textarea body produce a different result from clicking on markup free
space next to it?

If this is still too vague for a reply please just ignore it.

[Ben Bacarisse]

kettle <Jo****************@gmail.comwrites:

On Jun 13, 11:51 pm, "Jonathan N. Little" <[e-mail]:

>kettle wrote:

Hi,

I have a simple web page which is composed of a flash audio player
(jwmp3player) and a form with a textarea box. I have noticed some
very odd behaviour which I cannot puzzle out.

Great for you! And you want someone to diagnose some vague problem
without actually seeing the page?

Actually no, I'm not looking for someone to fix my broken code, so I
apologize for framing my question wrong.

We need to see it (the code you think might be broken). I.e. we need
a URL for an example page. You explained the problem clearly enough,
but most odd problems are cause by details, so a URL is the only way
to see exactly what you are doing.

--
Ben.