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One
of the main draw backs of the current ability
to create image maps is the processing of
the map coordinates resides on the server.
Not only is this an in-efficient use of
the server resources, but it is oftentimes
cumbersome and the ability to create image
maps is often times out of reach of the
end users.
The
use of client side image maps allows the
coordinates for an image map to be placed
within the HTML code, and places the burden
of processing these coordinates on the browser,
and thus making more efficient use of the
distributed processing of server vs. client.
This
section describes how to define client side
image maps (currently only supported by
Netscape® 2.x and Microsoft® Internet Explorer®
3.x browsers (There may be other browsers
that support this feature, however I am
not aware of them at the time of this writing))
A
new attribute is defined oft he <IMG>
tag as shown in the following example:
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<img
src="name-of-gif-file.gif"
usemap="#map-name-goes-here"> |
The usemap tag is a pointer to a <map></map>
tag location also to reside in the same
HTML document. The following is an example
of the <map></map> tags and
the area coordinates defined within the
<map> </map> tags.
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<map
NAME="map-name-goes-here">
<area
coords="83,68 162,116"
href="http://www.domain.com/dira/">
<area
coords="172,67 273,115"
href="http://www.domain.com/dirb/">
<area
coords="280,67 377,116"
href="http://www.domain.com/dirc/">
<area
coords="23,120 95,166"
href="http://www.domain.com/dird/">
<area
coords="108,120 185,167"
href="http://www.domain.com/dire/">
<area
coords="195,120 302,166"
href="http://www.domain.com/dirf/">
<area
coords="310,119 375,166"
href="http://www.domain.com/dirg/">
</map> |
Notice the NAME attribute within the <map>
tag directly relates to the USEMAP attribute
defined in the <IMG> tag. - This is
all there is to defining a client side image
map. To create the coordinates, you will
want to use a piece of software that will
generate the coordinates for you.
In
order to support both the Client side image
map implementation and the server side
Links
to other Pages
Targets
and Anchors
Adding
an Image
Client
Side Image Maps
Embedding
Midi/Wave Files
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