Tags tags tags

[cdd]

Image maps are an underated feature, they're extremely useful in reality. For some inexplicable reason they're snubbed by the rest of the web design community who prefer separate images which link to things.

Basically yes, 99.99% of home user browesrs on internet today would understand all taht - you can treat them all as links.

[Nick Harvey]

Tags?

Aren't they the things our nice new Home Secretary likes you to put round your ankles when you've been a naughty boy?

[Nick Harvey]

Sorry about that.

So you should be, Mr Grandhotel.

May the blue screen of death be your constant companion!

[Neil Jones]

Evening all.

I haven't used Image Maps on a website for years but was fiddling around in Dreamweaver earlier and found them invaluable. But I was just wondering whether I'm limiting my audience through using them. Leaving aside doorstop computers running a web browser coded by the Vikings, are there any browsers that wouldn't understand the following?

Image maps are one of those things that has been supported ever since Internet Explorer 3 and Netscape 2 were released, so we're going back the best part of 10 years or so. It's therefore safe to assume that modern browsers (such as Internet Explorer 6 and Firefox) are happy with them, and they are.

[MarkN]

Remember to read this first:
http://diveintoaccessibility.org/day_24 ... _maps.html

[cdd]

Remember to read this first:
http://diveintoaccessibility.org/day_24 ... _maps.html

Am I right in thinking taht technically it's illegal not to?

[Sput]

You're wrong, cdd, it's actually illegal

[Ebeneezer Scrooge]

Thanks loads, guys.

Firefox seems to be running around with its fingers in its ears going "la la la la la" towards the alt tooltips but hey you can't have everything!!

Have you tried using "title" as well as alt?

[Pete]

or even better - title *instead* of alt...

[Neil Jones]

Thanks loads, guys.

Firefox seems to be running around with its fingers in its ears going "la la la la la" towards the alt tooltips but hey you can't have everything!!

It's supposed to do that. Never mind what Microsoft and Internet Explorer would have you believe, the ALT tag isn't supposed to be a tooltip.

One can use an extension to reinstate this behaviour in Firefox (like I did considering I can only ever find a handful of sites that use this TITLE tag properly) but some purists would argue that all hell will break loose.

[Ebeneezer Scrooge]

Indeed as the two earlier posts suggest, it is working correctly - Alt is merely supposed to give alternative text if an image is unavailable (and so is only relevant to the image, rather than the map). Internet Explorer just does a poor job of handling it!
It is worth keeping the alt within the image tag, if you had an alt attribute in your map (or links for that matter), then they should be removed!

I was going to say that before, I just couldn't be bothered.