Apache: The Definitive Guide, 3rd Edition

Imagemaps

We have experimented with various sorts of indexing. Bearing in mind that words are going out of fashion in many circles, we may want to present an index as some sort of picture. In some circumstances, two dimensions may work much better than one; selecting places from a map, for instance, is a natural example. The objective here is to let the client user click on images or areas of images and to deduce from the position of the cursor at the time of the click what she wants to do next.

Recently, browsers have improved in capability, and client-side mapping (built into the returned HTML document) is becoming more popular. If you want to use server-side image maps, however, Apache provides support. The httpd.conf in ... /site.imap is as follows:

User webuser
Group webgroup
ServerName www.butterthlies.com
DocumentRoot /usr/www/APACHE3/site.imap/htdocs

AddHandler imap-file map
ImapBase map
ImapMenu Formatted

The three lines of note are the last. AddHandler sets up ImageMap handling using files with the extension .map. When you access the site you see the following:

Index of /
		Parent Directory 
	bench.jpg 
	bench.map 
	bench.map.bak 
	default.html 
	left.html 
	right.html 
	sides.html 
	things

This index could be made simpler and more elegant by using some of the directives mentioned earlier. In the interest of keeping the Config file simple, we leave this as an exercise for the reader.

Click on sides.html to see the action. The picture of the bench is presented: if you click on the left you ...