The image map is composed of three elements: the image file, the map file, and the HTML file which incorporates the clickable mapped image.

The image file may be in one of two formats. It may be in CompuServe's GIF format or it may be in the public domain JPEG format.

The map file is an ASCII text file which contains coordinates of the areas which you want associated with URLs. They should be in the following format:

default (URL)
(shape) (URL) coordinate-1,coordinate-2 ... coordinate-n

circle -- for a circle  (with two coordinate pairs:
                         center and any edgepoint) 
poly -- for a polygon   (with at most 100 vertices;
                         each coordinate is a vertex)
rect -- for a rectangle (with two coordinate pairs;
                         upper-left and lower-right)

e.g.,

default http://www.smart.net/~phchen/examples/map-err.htm
rect    http://www.smart.net/~phchen/examples/map-rect.htm 0,0 200,50
circle  http://www.smart.net/~phchen/examples/map-circ.htm 0,0 200,50
poly    http://www.smart.net/~phchen/examples/map-poly.htm 0,0 200,50 0,50

The HTML file may be any of your current WWW page files. To reference the image file and the map file, the HTML file must reference the map file in the URL and reference the image file with the link text. The URL should be in the following format:

http:/cgi-bin/imagemap(map file location)

Replace (map file location) with the location of your map file. e.g., /~phchen/examples/example.map

The link text should have the IMG SRC directive. Inside the IMG SRC directive should be the key word "ISMAP".

To see an example of a clickable map, click here. To view the HTML file source for the clickable image map example, click here. To see the Map file source for the clickable image map example, click here.

Happy Web Spinning!

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