Client-Side Imagemaps

Although server-side imagemaps were in common use in the early days of the Web, their weaknesses led Netscape to add support for client-side imagemaps to version 2.0, which was released in March 1996. Because they were vastly superior to server-side imagemaps, soon all the other browser makers added support for them as well. Clientside imagemaps address the problems with server-side imagemaps by eliminating the need for a special imagemap program on the server. Instead, they manage all the imagemap processing locally in the web browser itself.

Later in this lesson, you'll learn how to create client-side imagemaps.

Imagemaps and Text-Only Browsers

Because of the inherently graphical nature of imagemaps, they work well only in graphical browsers. Lynx, the most popular text-based browser, provides limited support for client-side imagemaps. If you load a page in Lynx that contains a client-side imagemap, you can get a list of the links contained in the imagemap.