Re: ISMAP idea (?v4)

lilley (lilley@afs.mcc.ac.uk)
Mon, 10 Apr 95 10:53:49 EDT

Brian Behlendorf writes:

> On Sun, 9 Apr 1995, James P H Coleman wrote:

> > When using an image/etc often I want the cursor to have hot areas such that
> > when you move the mouse over a hot area, a piece of text is displayed. eg a
> > photograph and as the mouse moves over a building, some text appears saying
> > what the building is.

> Implemented wonderfully in HTML 3 using the <FIG> tag - the
> implementation allows imagemap-challenged browsers to present a menu of
> the options available. Check out
> <URL:http://www.hpl.hp.co.uk/people/dsr/html/figures.html>

I believe that this is not what James was asking. HTML 3.0 allows a
menu (or other marked up text) as an alternative to the graphical
representation of the figure. It further allows (but does not require)
feedback such as a cursor shape change when moving into a hot spot.

What James seems to be asking for is a dynamically changing document,
which alters or unfolds as the cursor is moved over an image. In other
words, the displayed text in some other area of the same document
changes depending on the cursor position.

At present it is only possible to fake this by requiring an active image
selection (`click') which would take you to a different document (with
the same active image). This would get inefficient quite soon as the
same document was requested time and time again; the interaction loop
would also be slow because of the need to fetch each document.

It might be possible (are client-side scripts still projected to be part
of HTML 3.0?) to associate the cursor position with changes to the
stylesheet so that different parts of the document were unfolded.

But in general, HTML documents are still static things. Doing something
like the Mac `bubble help' is hard.

--
Chris Lilley
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