OBJECT and map

An issue has come up in the HTML WG and I'd like to get
your input.

The OBJECT tag, which embeds multimedia in HTML (Java, ActiveX,
ShockWave, etc, or plain IMG), has recently lost it's client-side
image map support.

It used to be possible to do:

 <OBJECT DATA="foo.gif" USEMAP="#map1">
   A selectable image representing a foo 
 </OBJECT>

 <MAP name=map1>
   <AREA>...
   <AREA>...
  </MAP>

or even more directly

  <OBJECT DATA="foo.gif" SHAPES>
    A selectable image representing a foo 
     <A  coord>...
     <A  coord>...
  </OBJECT>

but for reasons that are unclear to me (implementation issue
apparently), both attributes 'shapes' and 'usemap' are gone, so one
would now have to rely on regular IMG to do client-side image map.

What this means to us is that OBJECT cannot be a long term replacement
for IMG, since client-side image maps are so important for
accessibility.

If OBJECT is not a replacement for IMG, the issue of associating long
description to images that are used as map might have to be revisited.

The following is not longer possible:

  <OBJECT DATA="foo.gif" USEMAP="#map1">
   A selectable image representing a foo 
   <A HREF="foo_desc.html" CLASS=LONGDESC>Long description</A> available.
 </OBJECT>

so one might have to rely on a LONGDESC IMG extension:

  <IMG SRC="foo.gif" USEMAP="#map1"
   ALT="A selectable image representing a foo"
   LONGDESC="foo_desc.html">
  </IMG>

or on the D link + CSS (and display none):

  <IMG SRC="foo.gif" USEMAP="#map1"
   ALT="A selectable image representing a foo">
  </IMG>
  <A HREF="foo_desc.html" CLASS=LONGDESC>D</A>

or some combination of HEAD method and Metadata technique.


How do people feel about that ?

PS: on the good side, they haven't added server-side image map to
    OBJECT :-)

Received on Friday, 8 August 1997 08:08:25 UTC