At about 5:00 p.m., the gang began to learn about imagemaps. You run across imagemaps on the World Wide Web. They look like
pictures, and you can click on different areas of them to access different
URLs. For instance, you might see a map of Africa, and when you click on
Namibia you go to a page about Namibia, when you click on Egypt you go to
a page about Egypt, and so forth :-).
- Ken Williams
We first chose an image to turn into an imagemap. The first
thing you have to do is use a program that will mark the
various "clickable" sections of your image and assign a URL to each
area. Then you save a couple of files (one that's the image itself, one
that's a text description that says what areas of the image take you to
which URLs), and voilà!
Well, not quite. We ran into a couple of
problems with the program that we used to map out the
clickable areas in the image, not to mention the fact that we were getting
pretty tired by then. But we persisted, and by six o'clock all of us had working
clickable images in one form or another.
Another thing that we learned in this session is how to set up part of
your Macintosh as an HTTP server so that people can access files on it
through the WWW. Here's the detailed description: get the application
"MacHTTP" and double click on it.
Steve Weimar commented that in
most cases you don't want to use imagemaps, since they're slow to load
and often aren't any more helpful in navigating than well-written HTML
is. But in some cases, where the image actually adds understanding, an
imagemap can be exactly what's called for. If you want people to investigate the vertices, edges, and faces of a geometric figure, an imagemap would be helpful in visualizing the chosen figure.
The key is knowing when to use an imagemap.