Preserved Topic: opinions on image maps

are image maps as compatable as a table with the image sliced up?

thanks

Spam is yummy
~babamba

They should be...

no, they are not accessable in lynx. also, im not certain how text readers (for the blind) handle them.

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this rose has a thorn...

Text browsers won't show images, so it really doesn't matter if you use table with sliced images or image maps...

i guess i should have stated it more clearly. lynx only shows the image, not any of the "hot spots". a lynx user could not navigate on a site where the only method of navigation is an image map.

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this rose has a thorn...

Image maps are overused, I think. People use them when they have something like a circular button, because they want the space you put your mouse over to be perfectly circular. That's not necessary - a square can be used, because no one would see any reason to put their mouse in the little corner where there is no button to press. People may very well notice that the link space doesn't exactly fit the picture of the button, but they won't actually care. So their usage for fitting hyperlink areas perfectly to images isn't necessary.

Also, they make it harder to do things like rollovers - you've got one big image, and you can't change just a small part of it.

I've never found a reason to use an image map.

The only decent use I've seen with them is when you have a large image with some very irregularly shaped areas that needed to be clickable; like on geographical maps for instance. But I still really hate it when the dotted lines remain and you see that ugly multilateral region, ick! So I basically agree with Slime, I just don't see much use for them.

I've been working on a make-over of one of my old sites. I've only uploaded this one page, so none of the links on the page are there.

Falling for Eyes


I basically married csim and slices for this. Functional and cuts down the doc weight and number of dependents considerably.

I've only found inage maps to be useful when needing only an image with text links on it, with no special effects. Now layers, that's a different story...and probably more compatible in the future.

la'dasha- i have never seen an image when i used lynx... has it been changed from a text based browser to a gui?

~velvetrose

Actually, I think La'dsasha meant that in lynx it would just show up as [image] or some textual indication that an image was in that spot. As far as I know, lynx is still a text only browser. But I could be wrong, I don't get to use unix much these days

its going to depend on the image. if no alt tags are present, it shows it as [path_to_image], otherwise it just displays the alt text as if it were just an ordinary paragraph. this is why alt tags are so important.

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this rose has a thorn...