gidday

I am new to imagemaps and would like some advice so that I can 
avoid the obvious traps for 'young' players.

What I would like to do is use a (real) tree graphic on the 'entry' 
page, where branches and leaves are clickable. 

(In case you are saying .. don't have a front door with very little 
information and links on it 'cos it just delays and irritates the visitor .. 
I agree in general, but there are some special circumstances here : 
the front door won't necessarily be the main point of entry, but if 
people backtrack to it, it will present a unifying view - sort of an 
organizational map)


The tree graphic could be a bit on the large side and I will make 
strenuous efforts to keep the size down with some gif optimizers or 
whatever, but I don't want to use sliced images. Not only don't I not 
know how to do them (ie make the slices), I just don't like the look 
when they download in bits particularly over a slow connection. Am I 
being too rigid here? 

OK, if the graphic is being downloaded in one hit and might be a bit 
slow I probably need to do something like provide a site menu off to 
the left, or maybe embed the graphic in the center of a table that 
has some textual links.


Q1. What controls the order in which bits of the page are loaded?. If 
I have a table with some text and a graphic, is there any assurance 
that the text will be loaded first?


Now to image maps.

I don't think I want to consider server side image maps - that looks 
just too kludgy and hard to implement. Am I wrong?

Client side image maps

Q2. From my initial research (well, googling) it seems that client side 
image maps are supported by later browsers only ?  Is so? not so? 
Any browser specific issues that I need to look out for?

Q3. I am unclear as to whether I can declare a polygon in a client 
side image map? 

Q4. Generating the imagemap HTML and all the funny coordinates .. 
seems like I need a special prog for this .. MapEdit from 
www.boutell.com seems to be frequently mentioned. Comments? 
Alternatives? (I see also that Photoshop 5.5 with ImageReady or 
somesuch can do this, but I don't have Photoshop 5.5)

Q5. Netscape seems to support a low resolution and faster loading 
version with the LOWSRC directive .. does this work OK? worth 
doing?

Q6. It seems I can do an imagemap with a JPG also. At least 
according to 
http://developer.netscape.com/docs/manuals/htmlguid/tags8.htm

Is there a good reason to stick with GIF? I don't have any evidence 
for this but I would have thought that a JPEG would offer 
compression as good as a GIF

Q7. I can apparently make any of the links open a new window with 
target=_blank ; what I am groping towards is the concept of a 
central  "siteimagemap" window that is always present (possibly 
chromeless) and that serves as the central navigation device. I am 
none too clear on this myself, so I guess this is a non question, just 
an "I wish"



Well, thanks in advance for any comments/suggestions/ideas on this 
one and thanks for all the guidance I have received in the past..like 
a lot of people I am an incremental and somewhat slow learner and 
feedback from a group like this really helps me along.

HTML: hwg-basics mailing list archives, maintained by Webmasters @ IWA