About Imagemaps

You know that an image file can serve as a link source; clicking the image activates the link. By creating an imagemap, you can make different areas within one image activate different links. Figure 29.1 shows an imagemap.

Figure 29.1. Clicking on different parts of this imagemap activates different links.

An imagemap is an inline image containing multiple links, each of which is activated when the visitor clicks a different area of the image.

Imagemaps are used for fancy jobs, such as maps ”click a country or state and a link opens a document about it. But imagemaps have more mundane uses as well; for example, most button bars you see online are imagemaps. The whole bar is one big GIF file, but the imagemap assigns a separate URL to each button.

The links in an imagemap can point anywhere that any other link can point: to another Web page, to an email address, to a bookmark ( target ), or to a file for download or display, for example.