Re: ALT specification

lilley (lilley@afs.mcc.ac.uk)
Tue, 20 Jun 1995 11:56:46 +0100 (BST)


Jonathan L Neuenschwander said:
>
> I'll second the plea for more than just text inside ALT.

See my reply, about HTML 3.0 FIG.

> One thing I've
> discovered users seem to expect is that an imagemap be replaced with a
> a menu when images are turned off.

<A HREF="http://site/cgi/bettermap">
<IMG SRC=imagemap.gif ALT="Here is the menu" ISMAP></A>

The image map handler is in a position to return such a menu, because
the map file contains all the URLs. It would be pretty simple to modify
the map handlers that come with NCSA or CERN httpd to do this.

And of course a FIG does this sort of thing without any round trip to
the server, and the menu can have as much pretty formatting and explanatory
text as you want. See:

http://www.hpl.hp.co.uk/people/dsr/html/figures.html

Another option is to use client-side imagemaps. The client can then
provide feedback when you move the pointer over a hotzone in the image.
See the above URL, and also as an internet draft:

draft-ietf-html-clientsideimagemap-00.txt

from the usual internet draft mirrors. For example,

http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/html/draft-ietf-html-clientsideimagemap-00.txt

-- 
Chris Lilley, Technical Author
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