What is an Image Map?
An image map is any image on a webpage that has been divided into sections that act as individual separate links. Sections of the overall image have their own unique qualities and can be linked to different files, other images or webpages. Example This single image has been divided into sections. Move your mouse over the image and click the linked sections of it.
An image map is a graphic that is displayed on a web page containing clickable regions to assist in navigation. Some sites, such as wiseGEEK, use a list of links to help visitors navigate around the website. The content from the site is linked, allowing visitors to find what they are looking for as quickly as possible. Other websites use image maps to accomplish the navigation. The graphics are split up into regions and each region is assigned an image map link. Some applications create slices of the image and each slice can have image map links assigned to them, while other applications allow the image map creator to drag and select a portion of the image and then assign an image map link to the selected section. The image map links are assigned hyper-links to content within the site or even elsewhere on the Internet. Usually web development tools, like Adobe Dreamweaver®, will be able to assist in creating image maps. Once the image to use for the image map is loaded into the environ
An image map is an image that acts as a link, but instead of simply acting as a link to a single page, the image acts as a link to multiple pages. For instance, say you have a map of the United States that you wish to act as an image map. Then you could specify different areas of the map to take you to different pages. An image map consists of two parts. First, there is the image itself. This can be any image, so you don’t need to alter the image in any way to make it act as an image map. The functionality to point to different links comes from within the HTML code itself.
In short, an image map provides the ability to define one or many areas on a bitmap (that is any photograph or bit-image picture that can be published on the World Wide Web) and treat each defined area as a separate HTML (or JavaScript) hypertext link. A defined area is called a hotspot and hotspots can be almost any shape and size. If you study our map of Treasure Island you will see that it has ten red squares and each one of these red squares has been defined as a hotspot in the corresponding HTML ‘treasure’ image map. Try clicking on each of the red squares and an Alert box will pop-up and tell you where on the treasure map the hotspot is located. You should note that the red squares have no signifigance and their only purpose is to tell you where the hotspots are on this particular map image. You could have the image map and hotspots without the red squares being displayed on the image and this would would just make it a bit harder to find the hotspots. To demonstrate this we have
