Re: [WD XHTML 2.0] usemap attribute

> Related to image map, other people suggested to completely trash
> image and image map functionality of XHTML and adopt certain portion
> of SVG as part of XHTML 2.  That might be an interesting idea, and
> I'd like to solicit people's opinion on that idea.

I'm going to have to mull over the rest of your message and figure out if I
still care about idref vs. uri, but this idea gets to the crux of the
problem and clarifies it--the image map belongs with the image, not the page
it appears on.

If only raster images are to be used as the basis for an image map, I think
it would make sense to have a separate file that defines the map (because
forcing the map to be part of every document is silly and a waste of bytes),
but perhaps it shouldn't be an (X)HTML file, but instead a plain text file,
a limited XML file, or an SVG image whose sole purpose is to provide a map.
Any of those could be used to avoide the problems you referenced.

But since a vector SVG image can be scaled cleanly and have its associated
map scale along with it, and can contain text, this is perhaps the ideal
replacement for today's awkward raster image/separate map problem. Those who
still want to use raster images can do so with SVG's built-in support for
referencing them.

Received on Saturday, 10 August 2002 01:29:07 UTC