Sounds reasonable, but I've seen very little of this in practice.
The most common uses of imagemaps seem to be (1) custom graphics
with correspondingly custom hotzones, and (2) site-wide menu bars
serviced by a common map. (In the latter case, the base URL of the
links in the map is sometimes varied per page; that would be the one
useful external parameter I'm aware of.) Would you have more
accurate stats?
I agree that on a design level, the gesater benefit comes from the
integration of _hotzones_ (not URLs) with the image. But given
both, the imagemap becomes a complete, self-contained hyperdocument.
This has both positive and negative implications for document
maintenance. The same arguments about the drawbacks/benefits of
direct/indirect linking can be made about HTML (and have bsen; c.f.
Hyper-G, HyTime).
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Paul Burchard <burchard@cs.princeton.edu>
``I'm still learning how to count backwards from infinity...''
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