How to create an imagemap on the COE Web server.

Things you need in order to use imagemap:

• 1: Need to already have a CoE WWW Homepage started.
• 2: You need to have an image. This image should be in the GIF format.
• 3: Next you will need to setup coordinates for the image in a map file.
• 4: Lastly you will need to setup the URL in your homepage

To see an example click here.

Imagemap configuration file. (Map file)

This file maps regions to URLs for the given image.

Lines beginning with # are comments. Every other non-blank line consists of the following:

method url coord1 coord2 ... coordn

coord are each coordinates, format x,y. The number depends on method.

method is one of the following:

• default
  For the default URL. Coordinates: none
• circle
  For a circle. Coordinates: center circle
• poly
  For a polygon of at most 100 vertices. Each coordinates is a vertex.
• rect
  For a rectangle.. Coordinates: upper-left lower-right
• point
  For closest to a point. Coordinates: thePoint

url is one of the following:

• a virtual pathname to a file on your server. For more infomation on URLs, check out the url-primer

Notes:

• each method is evaluated in the order it is placed in the configuration file. If you have overlapping areas, such as a circle inside of a rectangle, you should place whichever one you want evaluated first before the other in the map file. In this case, we would put the circle before the rectangle.
• Also note that it does not make sense to use the default method with the point method because if even one point method is specified, anywhere you click will be considered close to the point and the URL specified by point will be serviced.

Referencing Your New Map (The URL)

To reference your net map, you contruct a URL pointing to it.

For example, if you have created a example.map file in your html directory and and used the image sample.gif for the map. Then the following will reference it:

<A HREF="http:/cgi-bin/imagemap2/user/username/example.map"><IMG SRC="sample.gif" ISMAP></a>

Take a look a this demo which also makes use of some of the features. The steps used to setup the demo image are listed:

• Make a imagemap

  I created a directory called im and put all my example imagemap stuff in it. I wrote a example.map. The utility xv was used to get the coordinates in this Map Configuration File.

• Referencing the map

  I have a picture in a file called example.gif. To reference my map, I have this line: < HREF="/cgi-bin/imagemap2/users/rayh/im/example.map"><IMG SRC="example.gif" ISMAP></A>