Are HTML Image Maps still used?
HtmlImagemapHtml Problem Overview
Do people still use the old HTML Image Maps? The ones with:
<map name="test" id="test">
<area shape="poly" alt="" title="" coords=...
Or is there a newer, better alternative?
Html Solutions
Solution 1 - Html
Yes, people do still use image maps. An alternative would be to position elements using absolute positioning and CSS but that's not necessarily better. It also doesn't allow you to have shapes like in image maps
Solution 2 - Html
They are in the HTML5 specification, so they will not get deprecated.
You can still freely use them, they certainly still have their place in web development. Or I could say, those rare occasions exist where you can best solve something with an image map.
Solution 3 - Html
An alternative solution to using CSS or image maps would be to make use of SVG graphics embedded into the HTML dom.
One tutorial on how to achieve mouseover effects using this technique is described in this tutorial: http://www.petercollingridge.co.uk/data-visualisation/mouseover-effects-svgs
The key takeaway being that SVG elements also trigger traditional dom events including onmouseover and onmouseout.
Solution 4 - Html
Yes html image maps are good especially if you want your area to be a polygon. You can add rollover effects to you map as well with javascript. There is a nice tutorial and demo here:
http://www.tutorialized.com/view/tutorial/Image-Map-Rollover/3484
Solution 5 - Html
Image Maps are still in HTML5 specifications, supported by all browsers.
They can be adapted to responsive design using jQuery RWD Image Maps: https://github.com/stowball/jQuery-rwdImageMaps
It detects and automatically resize the image maps coordinates.
It's also available for Wordpress developers as plugin: http://wordpress.org/plugins/responsive-image-maps/
Simple and effective solution.
Solution 6 - Html
Yes, I still use image maps, however my last project used Raphaël. It was pretty easy to get something up and running.
http://dmitrybaranovskiy.github.io/raphael/
From their web site:
> Raphaël ['ræfeɪəl] uses the SVG W3C Recommendation and VML as a base > for creating graphics. This means every graphical object you create is > also a DOM object, so you can attach JavaScript event handlers or > modify them later. Raphaël’s goal is to provide an adapter that will > make drawing vector art compatible cross-browser and easy.
Nice simple image map example:
Solution 7 - Html
While I rarely see them used on modern websites anymore, they do seem to be used by my clients in their email campaigns. However, I've noticed, and confirmed that there are some scaling issues with the coordinate system on mobile devices.
** I know this thread is old, I was just doing some additional research into this for a recent email campaign issue and thought it may help someone else down the line.
3rd party edit
The question on litmus.com on image map support is from 04/2014
> Image maps do not support ALT tags, when images aren't loaded the ALT text isn't displayed in some clients. > > Image map usage generally results in using large images which can cause deliverability issues and hinder download speed (especially > important to mobile users). > > And most importantly, The iOS (iphone/ipad) doesn't scale the image map link coordinates when the image is scaled which breaks the > links. Since iOS represents a large majority of email opens (iPhone + > iPad = 38% via http://emailclientmarketshare.com/) this is important.
Solution 8 - Html
Yes, it still used
An image map allows a user to hyperlink to many pages by clicking different parts of an image.Simply by using image map we create lists of coordinates relating to a specific area of the same image and give the hyperlink to a different location. By using this within a single image we give multiple links.
Solution 9 - Html
image map is quite interesting option in html and html5 they are still being use and i personally love it i therefore find issuse in mobile devices my issue is relatd to scaling
yes i have experience it my self however i am a student enrolled in html html5 and for begineers i would like to follow w3chools link
http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_images.asp
you will gain alot from this [page