I hate default select control, that’s because it can’t be styled in IE using CSS.
This is why I developed a new select control from scratch, using HTML + CSS + JavaScript.
I did a great job in the past two days matching CSS and HTML together, but today I discovered a bug wich looks very hard for me to fix.
In IE 7, when I have tow controls on the same page, the one from top does not overlay the one from bottom.
See the image: coolrgb dot com/files/select-help.jpg
Download the demo page (HTML + CSS + Javascript): coolrgb dot com/files/select-help.zip
Please help me, this control looks so nice for me and I want to use it on all my projects from now on. This bug killed my hopes and lot of time.
Thank you.
If you give each control the same z-index, then you will not have control over the stacking order.
I would suggest modifying your control to behave more like a real SELECT element: only one can be open at a time, or losing focus causes it to close. Alternately, you can set a high z-index when the control has focus, and a lower one when it does not.
Another thing to look out for: try putting some other controls like radio, checkbox, and select under your control. You might find that IE also will not hover over those even if you give them a different z-index (as @grawity explained in his answer). This is why you’ll typically see widget demos displayed on top of these elements, as shown here: http://jqueryui.com/demos/dialog/
A typical hack to fix this is to use an iframe, but that probably deserves a different question altogether.