I have a sliding carousel of items, each of which includes its own like button. I want the like buttons to have comments; that is, when the user clicks Like, he should be presented with a prompt to leave a comment (http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/397/). I'm starting to doubt that these goals are compatible and would like to hear if anyone has already achieved it.
The comments on the Like buttons are wider than the items in the carousel, and correctly overflow onto other carousel items. However, some of these items are outside the clipping box, since the carousel items are necessarily inside a div with overflow: hidden (otherwise we wouldn't achieve the effect of the items scrolling into existence upon paging). Because of this, if I click Like on the rightmost item currently visible, the comments prompt that appears will be partially outside the clipping box and thus partially visible.
It appears to me the only possible hope of allowing the comments prompt to overflow the carousel container is to place the prompt outside the container in the dom. This way, assuming we can visually position the prompt next to its Like button where it belongs, it's no longer constrained by the container. This seems within possible, since at the time of this writing the comment prompt is implemented as a separate iframe from the button itself; i.e., this XFBML:
<fb:like width="450"></fb:like>
yields (approximately) this HTML:
<iframe src="facebook.com/like_button.php"></iframe>
<iframe src="facebook.com/comments_widget.php"></iframe>
But if I try to move the comments iframe in the dom, it instantly and permanently becomes empty. Even if I could find a way to detach certain events and prevent this, it shows that an intricate solution is called for, and one which Facebook can break at any time in the future with changes to their implementation. Thus, I can't move the comments in the dom, and thus, the prompt is always in danger of being clipped. Facebook says this on the subject:
If the Like button is placed near the edge of an HTML element with the overflow property set to hidden, the flyout may be clipped or completely hidden when the button is clicked. This can be remedied by setting setting the overflow property to a value other than hidden, such as visible, scroll, or auto.
Clearly in the case of a carousel it's not possible to remove overflow: hidden. Has anyone found a way around this, or should I give up and spend my time elsewhere?
Thanks