Hour 10. Graphical Links and Imagemaps

Hour 10. Graphical Links and Imagemaps

If you haven't been skipping around too much and you've read Hour 8, "Putting Graphics on a Web Page," you know how to make an image link to another document. (If you don't quite recall how to do it right now, it looks like this: <a href="gohere.htm"><img src="image.gif" alt="My image" /></a>.)

You can also divide an image into regions that link to different documents, depending on where someone clicks. This is called an imagemap, and any image can be made into an imagemap. A web site with medical information might show an image of the human body and bring up different pages of advice for each body part. A map of the world could allow people to click any country for regional information. Many people use imagemaps to create a "navigation bar" that integrates icons for each page on their web site into one cohesive imagemap.

Modern browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer allow you to choose between two methods for implementing imagemaps. Nowadays, all your imagemaps should be done using the latest method, which is called a client-side imagemap. There really is no longer any reason to make them work the old-fashioned server-side way because web browsers have been supporting client-side imagemaps for years.