Image Maps

Hi! Can anyone point me to a reference for creating server-side image maps on dreamhost?

I've just been doing some fast and loose testing, I don't really have too much of anything to show off a design or implementation at this point (see below). But so far my testing hasn't worked. I would like to make sure the nuts-and-bolts are gonna work before I design a complex map file. Anyway, first I had the image map file with the .map extention and clicking the image would just spit out the map file. So after some reading, I changed it to .cgi and now I get "500 internal server error" messages.

I've searched the wiki, the old KB, and the forums and can't seem to find any reference whatsoever to image maps. Are they not supported on DreamHost? Or am I overlooking something obvious here, like an include or a chmod I need to set?

This is the URL for the quick test I'm working on.
http://www.wasteofspace.org/maptest/Friends.html

This is the URL for the map file (not the exact file, but you can't read the .cgi file if you go to it)
http://www.wasteofspace.org/maptest/Friends.map

Thanks in advance.

It's been *years* since I have used a server-side image map, and I'll have to research enough to refresh my memory as to what is involved.

Just out of curiosity, any particular reasopn you dont want to use a client-side image map, as in this image map tutorial? Modern browsers handle this well, eliminating much of the need to use a server-side implementation.

At any rate, you asked about "server-side", so this might help:

Server-side image map tutorial for several webservers

Google bailed me out...it's starting to come back to me now.

--rlparker

Wow, thanks for the quick response! You're right. I can do this client-side, as I have discovered after posting. It's been years for me too since I've done server-side. Or any image-mapping at all actually, like 96 it think? Whenever I first started playing with web design and such.

Anyway, I saw a little piece of info that made me think that client-side handling varied between IE and Moz/FF so my one track mind went down the road of trying to figure out how to do it all server-side. But, nope. Client-side will work, thank god. But thanks for the info and reply, I'll keep those references handy in case I ever actually do end up needing to resurrect the corpse of server-side image mapping.

Good deal, I'm glad you found something useful in my response.

In reply to:

---

I saw a little piece of info that made me think that client-side handling varied between IE and Moz/FF

---

I've not found there to be significant differences in the way they handle imagemaps *now* (I'm sure there are some, as IE is not called "Internet Exploder" for no reason); it was more problematic in the browsers' earlier versions.

Certainly any "differences" in the way the two camps handle client-side image maps are not as pronounced as their CSS differences, and we can generally live with those

--rlparker

I (hesitatingly) had to use significant image maps for a project at work and was glad to find that (for a straight image map) there were no problems (tested on FF for PC and Mac, IE6, IE7B3, Safari 2.0.4, Opera 9.0.1).

The only real issue I had was that if you ADD an image map to a page after the page has already been processed (such as with innerHTML), IE will simply not use it.

I did a blog post about IE Image Map Problems a while back. Anyway, if you aren't doing anything fancy, you should have no problems with image maps across the browsers.

Check out Gordaen's Knowledge, the blog, and the MR2 page.