On Nov 12, 2009, at 11:12 , Nick Kew wrote:
Ken Dreyer wrote:
(another user's perspective)
At my work (US. Geological Survey) we try to discourage webmasters
from using server-side imagemaps, since they are not Section 508
compliant. We've had to keep the module to support some legacy sites,
but if 2.4 drops it, we can probably migrate any remaining server-
side
maps.
Hmmm. When I worked alongside some of your folks (joint project -
I was at ESRIN) we used server-side imagemaps to let users select
points on a (geographical) map. Any user without the map could
enter lat/long manually instead, and any clientside solution
(like scripting, or embedded java/flash) would raise more
serious accessibility problems (you'd want the serverside map
as a fallback for accessibility)!
Client-side image maps have been part of HTML for more than a decade.
It does not require any kind of scripting, java, flash, or javascript.
If the map can be encoded in a way that mod_imagemap understands, you
simply take that map data and put it directly in the HTML. The format
is the same. If the map is complex enough that you can't encode it in
a simple text map file, then mod_imagemap wouldn't help anyways, and
you'd need a custom solution. Forcing a round-trip to the server,
rather than putting the map data in the HTML, doesn't make any sense.
mod_imagemap doesn't offer *any* features that aren't included in the
HTML implementation. Even Lynx supports client-side imagemaps. And
client-side imagemaps are completely accessible, if you do the map
right, with comments. Lynx even provides a menu of the options in the
imagemap, along with their titles/comments.
--
Rich Bowen
[email protected]
