positioning an element to cover spans

The best way to phrase the question is 开发者_JAVA百科with an example.

If you look at http://jsfiddle.net/r4BcB/1/ , you can see that I'm trying to cover the select boxes and not the whole parent's parent (span1 and span2).

Is there anything I'm missing?

Just add position:relative to the wrapping span: http://jsfiddle.net/r4BcB/2/

Your cover span should be defined before the SELECTs you want to cover, something like this will do it :

<span>
    <span id="cover">Block the selects</span>
    <select><option>Select 1</option></select>
    <select><option>Select 2</option></select>
    <select><option>Select 3</option></select>
</span>