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RE: image maps & browser (in)compatibility

for

From: Leo Smith
Date: Jun 20, 2002 5:21AM

To add to this, Google does not spider image map links. So if you
have an image map linking to crucial pages, you are gonna want to
also have redundant text links that Google can spider.

Leo.

>
> On the other hand, even before this I had deduced that an image map
> should always be accompanied with "redundant" links or, to put it in
> another way, an author should use normal link elements for linking and
> consider image maps only as _alternatives_. For the reasons behind
> this conclusion, see http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/mapalt.html
> (For an orgchart, a suitable presentation could be nested lists of
> links, with the nesting of <ul> elements reflecting the levels of the
> organization. Admittedly, it easily becomes visually large, so one
> might put a link to it onto the primary page, right before [!] the
> image map.)
>
> Image maps themselves can be very useful, for accessibility too, e.g.
> for helping people who work visually much better than with text. But
> in the current situation, especially with the poor and even faulty
> implementations of image maps in browsers, there's no smooth way of
> using a single construct that works as an image map in visual
> presentation and as textual links otherwise. (It's the "graphic"
> browsers that are the problem here, not "text" browsers like Lynx.)
>

>



Leo Smith
Web Designer/Developer
USM Office of Publications and Marketing
University of Southern Maine
207-780-4774


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