Designing Web & Mobile Graphics: Fundamental Concepts for Web and Interactive Projects

Chapter 11. Image Maps

“I wanna hang a map of the world in my house. Then I’m gonna put pins into all the locations that I’ve traveled to. But first, I’m gonna have to travel to the top two corners of the map so it won’t fall down.”

—Mitch Hedberg

Putting basic link tags around an image makes the entire image a link. Alternatively, an image map, created by web pioneer Kevin Hughes in 1993, allows for multiple links at predefined areas within an image.

Back then, you had to use server-side programming to get image maps to work. Eventually, though, the browser vendors programmed the browser to handle the workload—as long as the HTML contained a ...