Web Design Garage

Chapter 35. Creating Image Maps

Image maps are images that have one or more clickable regions called hotspots. Each hotspot acts as a separate link. The links can go to different pages or execute different scripts, which makes image maps more useful than regular old clickable graphics, where the entire image acts as a single link.

GEEKSPEAK An image map is an image with one or more hotspots, or clickable regions.

In an image map, there's nothing special about the image file itself. You can start with any Web graphic. What turns the image into an image map is a block of HTML code that defines the shape, location, and function of the hotspots. So, an image map consists of two parts:

1. The image file itself

2. The block of code that defines the hotspots ...