[whatwg] <input usemap> (was: Re: [html5] HTMLMapElement.images)

[Michael A. Puls II]

On 8/9/07, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> I did a thorough study of this (details below) and I concluded that we're
> better off removing it. I've removed <input usemap> from the spec.
>
> Out of 3.5 billion or so HTML pages examined in this survey, only 0.00036%
> (about 12000) had a usemap="" attribute on an <input> element pointing to
> a <map> that contained an <area> with both a coords="" attribute and an
> href="" attribute, the latter of which was not the empty string or a
> single "#". These pages were distributed over about 500 separate domains.
>
> This is a sample of those pages ...

Thanks. Much appreciated.

<http://www.wheresmysquare.com/>

With that page from the list, it uses <input type="image"> so that
when you click on a spot in the image, the coordinates of where you
clicked are submitted. usemap="#map1" is also used on the input so
that when clicking on certain spots in the image (defined by the area
elements), instead of submitting coordinates, a link (defined by the
corresponding area element) is navigated to.

Without <input usemap>, how would you accomplish the same? Would you
just use <img usemap> with an area element to define the range and
link for each of the ~3000 squares?

If that's what you'd have to do, I suppose it doesn't matter because
you have to do it anyway if you want to support more than FF and
Opera. Plus, you'd have to do it anyway once the square fills up.

I just thought I'd make note of that situation.

Also, with <input usemap>, Opera (unlike FF) won't display the image
context menu when you right-click. It also won't display the link
context menu when you right-click on a link part of the image, so
these are even more reasons to dump <input usemap>.

I checked some of the other sites and some of them were just using
<input usemap> instead of <img usemap> for now reason whatsoever.

> I've removed <input usemap> from the spec.

No objections from me.

-- 
Michael