Apache: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition

7.3. 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 he or she wants to do next.

Recently, browsers have improved in capability and client-side mapping (built into the returned HTML script) is becoming more popular. It is also possible to embed an imagemap in the HTML (see http://home.netscape.com/assist/net_sites/html_extensions_3.html). However, here we do it at the server end. The httpd.conf in ... /site.imap is as follows:

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

AddHandler imap-file map
ImapBase map
#ImapDefault default.html
#ImapDefault error
ImapDefault referer
ImapDefault map

ImapMenu Formatted

The seven lines of note are the last. AddHandler sets up imagemap handling using files with the extension .map.

7.3.1. ImapBase

ImapBase [map|referer|URL]
Default: http://servername
Server config, virtual host, directory, .htaccess

This directive sets the base URL for the imagemap, as follows:

map

The URL of the imagemap itself.

referer

The URL of the referring document. If this is unknown, ...