This question is more philosophical than technical.
I’ve trained myself as a web developer back when web developers were called webmasters and my tool of choice was FrontPage, moving onto Evrsoft 1st Page 2000.
That was the last time I used an HTML image map.
Now it’s HTML5, AJAX, vector canvasses, CSS 3D, jQuery, local storage, touchscreen Safari, you name it. The image map has faded into an obscurity where not even Google comes up with too many relevant results; a mandatory W3C Schools entry and some forum posts from 2004.
Obviously creating a website navigation or similar triviality using an image map was a bad idea back then and it certainly is inexcusable today.
But right now I have a task to create a polygon clickable area on top of a div with a background image.
I’d have no issue doing this in image map since it seems like it was designed for a use case exactly like this, and while I’ve done no tests, I couldn’t imagine any browser dropping support for an element that worked beautifully for years. But I can’t help but think that there must be a better way to do this today.
My web creation philosophy is to develop for IE5.5, and then design for Chrome edge. This means that the site first needs to work on a basic level on even the most antiquated browser, and then start adding JS & CSS to make it more beautiful, more usable, faster, simpler, friendlier and better.
As such, while I know I could do a canvas in Raphaël and add all kinds of snazzy hover effects and things, I think making functionality as simple as this shouldn’t require a 89 kb (or X kb) JS library. Or even JS at all.
I don’t know if CSS3 has capabilities to define polygonal areas, but while recognizing the great possibilities introduced by CSS3, I prefer keeping anything defined there as non-essential flair that would degrade gracefully.
So in today’s webdev world, what would be the most cross-browser way to define a polygonal click area (preferably in a way that’s grabbable by a jQuery .hover(), or at least a CSS :hover), that isn’t dependent on JavaScript or CSS attributes available in a minority of browsers? Is image map really the only way to do it? What of mobile devices?
Why is using image maps for navigation inexcusable? It’s a tool like any other; it has a time and place. Using imagemaps with javascript enhancements is backward compatible, degrades gracefully, and has 100% browser support. They don’t need a plugin like flash.They’ve been supported practically since the dawn of the web browser. Just because something’s old doesn’t mean it isn’t useful; quite the opposite, it means it’s well supported.
I wrote a jquery plugin called ImageMapster to add effects to imagemaps so you could create interactive images without using flash. It would be easy to implement a tool that had the same functonality without Javascript support by replacing with a list in those cases. Personally, I think trying to write for the web without javascript is like trying to drive a car without tires. 99% of the web doesn’t work without it any more. This isn’t 1995. But if you really are concerned, the nice thing about imagemaps is the basic navigation functionality still works. There’s no way to accomplish that just with CSS — not even CSS3 if you have irregular shaped areas.