Empty div hover event not firing in IE

Question

I have a div with a child div inside it. I'm using jQuery to show / hide the child div whenever a mouse hovers over the parent div (parent div spans the entire bottom of the page. Width: 100% and height 100px). I've used both firebug and ie developer toolbar to confirm that the parent div is on the page.

I can hover over the empty parent div in both Chrome and FireFox and everything works fine. IE requires that I have some sort of text inside to hover over. The div hover event will not fire with just an empty div.

All plausible work arounds for this issue?

--Update

Tried all of your suggestions but nothing has worked yet.

<div id="toolBar">          
  <div>
    <button id="btnPin" title="Click to pin toolbar" type="button">
      <img id="pin" src="../../images/icons/unpin.png" alt="Pin" /></button>
      <img src="../../images/icons/search.png" border="0" alt="Search" />
  </div>
</div>

The above html is contained within a master page div container. The child div is hidden with jQuery with some hover in/out events. The parent div (toolBar) is always visible on the page. When a hover occurs on toolBar the child div is shown.

Heres the jQuery code

$('#toolBar').hover(ToolBar_OnHover, ToolBar_OnBlur);

function ToolBar_OnHover() {

  $(this).children().fadeIn('fast');
  $(this).animate({ height: "100px" }, "fast");

}

function ToolBar_OnBlur() {

  $(this).children().fadeOut('fast');
  $(this).animate({ height: "50px" }, "fast");

}

Finally here's a little css

#toolBar { width: 100%; height: 100px; text-align:center; vertical-align:middle; position: absolute;  bottom: 0; background-color: Transparent;  }
#toolBar div { padding: 5px 5px 0px 5px; width:75%; height: 95px; background: transparent url('/images/toolbar-background.png') repeat-x; margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto; }

Answer 1

it will work if you set a background-color or a border ...

if you could match either of these with the existing look then you would be ok..

(a background-image seems like the most unobtrusive solution)

Answer 2

I know that the question has been answered but I encountered the same problem. The empty div wouldn't fire the function. And if it had a border only the border itself would start the function. I tried lots of stuff, nothing helped. Here is my solution, it's pretty much the same only thing is that I didn't use an image. Add this to your CSS:

div {             /* write the element's name, class or id here */
background: #FFF; /* you can choose any colour you like, 1.0-fully visible */
opacity:0.0;      /* opacity setting for all browsers except IE */
filter: alpha(opacity = 0); /* opacity setting for IE, 0-transparent & 100-fully visible */
}

Answer 3

None of comments and filters stuff works for me. The div is never rendered, so no hover possible.

Ultimate solution:

.aDiv {
    background: transparent url(../images/transparent.gif) repeat;
}

With a one pixel transparent gif image. Sure it works !

Answer 4

If you want to preserve your DIV this worked for me: background-color: rgba(0,0,0,0.001);