---

During the development of Object Forge's website it became clear that site maintenance required the ability to load HTML content that was not part of the main site page. The site's main page contains a large background graphic and reloading this would have imposed an unacceptable user overhead, especially over modem connections. There was also a maintenance issue since the site's content is generated from a number of sources that can generate HTML but HTML is not their native format.

Initially the IE:DOWNLOAD tag appeared to be the answer but there is no equivalent tag in Navigator and so the resulting pages would not render correctly for a significant portion of the Internet community. A more subtle problem was that search engines would not necessarily interpret the tag and so most of the site's content would be hidden from them.

These pages demonstrate the solution that was used to build the Object Forge site. The approach is generic (it works iwth both IE and Netscape) and uses transparent IFRAMES and a small Javascript function. The function, loadBody(), fetches a URL into an IFRAME on the site's main page. The IFRAME has the 'allowtransparent' style property set to 'true' which means that the parent's background will show through if the loaded page's 'background-color' style tag is set to 'transparent'. The result is that loaded content appears to hover over the main page's background.

If you wish to discuss the content here please contact Object Forge or visit our website. Thanks for your interest and we hope the content here proves useful.