Wimsey Imagemap Mini-FAQ

January 4, 1995

Lots of people seem to be asking about imagemaps for their WWW pages on Wimsey. I seem to have become the guy who takes care of them, so I'll invite anyone who's interested to direct their questions to me.

In the meantime, here's some FAQs. These are meant specifically for Wimsey users, so if you're reading this from elsewhere, don't take it too seriously.

1) Does Wimsey support imagemaps?

Yes. Wimsey runs the NCSA server, so the standard NCSA imagemap docs apply, and your map file should comply with the NCSA spec.

2) Where are the docs?

The documentation (warning: this is not an award-winning manual) is available from the NCSA at:

    http://wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu:8080/map-tutorial/image-maps.html

3) What do I need to do?

Read the docs, but in short, you need to do three and a half things things:

First, create a map. Take a GIF image and map out the regions you want clickable by pixel co-ordinates (0,0 is the upper left corner of your GIF). You don't want your regions to overlap.

Second, stick your map in an HTML page. The URL for your map should look like this (assuming your graphic is called "foo.GIF"):

   <A HREF="[unarchived-link]"><IMG SRC="[unarchived-media]" ISMAP></A>

Third, create the map co-ordinates file (usually with a name ending in ".map"), which is a text file with a list of your region co-ordinates and the URLs they should point to. This file also needs a line specifying the default URL (in case the user clicks outside a defined region). Each line in the file refers to a region, and will look something like this:

   rect http://www.foo.com/whatever/file.html 184,326 191,333

There are several utilities avaliable that make this process easier. For instance, a Macintosh program called WebMap makes this step a piece of cake.

The third-and-a half thing you need to do is have somebody in an admin position let the server know about your map by adding you to the imagemap.conf file. I can do this for you, but I need to know two things: (1) the name of your map as you have specified it in the URL around your GIF, and (2) the location on your "foo.map" co-ordinates file.

4) It doesn't work. What do I do?

Triple check everything, refer back to the docs three or four times, then if it still doesn't work, make a note of whatever error message you're getting and send me some mail. Everyone seems to fail at this the first time through, but once you've got it, it's pretty simple to build these things.

5) Some Tips:

I find it makes things a lot easier if you use the same name for every segment of the process:

   tiddle.GIF
   tiddle.map
   /cgi-bin/imagemap/tiddle
   tiddle.html

That makes it easy to see what refers to what.

You have to make sure your co-ordinates file (foo.map) is uploaded correctly, as text. HTML is pretty forgiving about glitched carriage returns, but your co-ordinates file is a look-up table, and so it is very important that you make it a coherent list of discrete lines. When in doubt, check it from the UNIX prompt using pico or vi or emacs or something (Even "more", just to make sure that it looks like it's supposed to).

Hope this helps

   -JMax

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