On Sun, 9 Apr 1995, Brian Behlendorf wrote:
> On Sun, 9 Apr 1995, James P H Coleman wrote:
> > I know that this is not the right place for this but...
> >
> > 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.
> ...
> > Thoughts anyone?
>
> 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>
To elaborate, in the example in this URL:
<FIG SRC="mainmenu.gif">
<H1>Access HP from Hewlett Packard</H1>
<P>Select between:
<UL>
<LI><A HREF="guide.html" SHAPE="rect 30,200,60,16">Access Guide</A>
<LI><A HREF="about.html" SHAPE="rect 100,200,50,16">About HP</A>
<LI><A HREF="news.html" SHAPE="rect 160,200,30,16">News</A>
<LI><A HREF="products.html" SHAPE="rect 200,200,50,16">Products</A>
<LI><A HREF="contacts.html" SHAPE="rect 260,200,80,16">Worldwide Contacts</A>
</UL>
</FIG>
When someone moves their mouse over to the rectangle between "rect
30,200,60,16", a pop-up menu appears with the word "Access Guide". Of course
you don't get the information external to the <A> tag, but that's something
the document creator could be aware of. This should be something
configurable in the browser, like "Bubble Help" in the MacOS, and the content
provider shouldn't *presume* everyone has it on. Semantically it's very
consistant with the whole point of having text in a <FIG></FIG>. What's
really nice is this will compell authors to use this feature in <FIG> even if
they presume everyone viewing their content will be using imagemap-capable
browsers anyways - otherwise most content authors probably won't bother since
the only other time people see this info is if they're running with inlined
images turned off or using a text-mode browser.
Brian
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