HTML "overlay" which allows clicks to fall through to elements behind it [duplicate]

A silly hack I did was to set the height of the element to zero but overflow:visible; combining this with pointer-events:none; seems to cover all the bases.

.overlay {    height:0px;    overflow:visible;    pointer-events:none;    background:none !important;}

Add pointer-events: none; to the overlay.

Original answer: My suggestion would be that you could capture the click event with the overlay, hide the overlay, then refire the click event, then display the overlay again. I'm not sure if you'd get a flicker effect though.

[Update] Exactly this problem and exactly my solution just appeared in this post: "Forwarding Mouse Events Through Layers". I know its probably a little late for the OP, but for the sake of somebody having this problem in the future, I though I would include it.

For the record an alternative approach might be to make the clickable layer the overlay: you make it semi-transparent and then place the "overlay" image behind it (somewhat counterintuitively, the "overlay" image could then be opaque). Depending on what you're trying to do, you might well be able to get the exact same visual effect (of an image and a clickable layer semi-transparently superimposed on top of each other), while avoiding clickability problems (because the "overlay" is in fact in the background).