suggestion for form/ismap handling
marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Date: Mon, 20 Sep 93 03:41:27 -0500
From: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Message-id: <9309200841.AA12775@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
To: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: suggestion for form/ismap handling
X-Md4-Signature: d373ea6c4ecef736a532d6f2c586a0a2
Status: RO
Suppose the following:
For ISMAP image maps inside a FORM, when a click occurs on the image
map, instead of a normal query ("...?x,y") being sent to the query
server, the form is packaged up and sent as if a normal form SUBMIT
button had been pushed *with additional data* from the image map: e.g.
"?x=12&y=33&whatever=something&more=somethingelse" where "whatever"
and "more" are normal input elements from the form and "x" and "y"
come from the image map click.
This would allow the components of a FORM (toggle buttons, etc.) to
serve as a freely customizable "control panel" for an image map -- the
user could set toggles to get, e.g., "4x magnification" or "8x
magnification", or "return Sun audio" or "return SGI audio", or
whatever [those are stupid examples, but I'm tired], then click on the
image map to have something sophisticated happen. Think of how the
Expo terrain map works now, and how much smoother it could be if the
simulated toggle buttons were actual client-side toggle buttons.
Seems to me this opens up lots of possibilities for a very minor
change -- every document that uses FORM at all will have to be written
from scratch anyway, therefore every document that has an ISMAP image
map inside a FORM can take this into account, and no existing ISMAP
documents will break.
(In fact, had we realized what forms would be like back when we added
ISMAP, we would have done "x=12&y=13" rather than "12,13" but we
didn't, and there's no real reason to change it now, *except* for
this case -- image maps inside forms.)
Comments welcome...
Cheers,
Marc