HTML Rollover Map

But you don't want to do this. If you really need just a feature, it will take a lot of time in HTML, and will be a nightmare to get working correctly, and will be even worse to maintain. Use something else like Flash if you need to do this.

Yeah... I guess if your oddly shaped images are gifs with transparency behind them, positioned to the pixel next to each other, and then given hover states which would slide them behind one another... yeah, it could be done. I wouldn't want to spend all day figuring it out, though.

You can make rollover regions with 37-sided polygons if you really want..

if the map doesn't have many colors in it, I'd consider making the whole thing ONE image with different parts of itself highlighted.. use an imagemap program (or dreamweaver) and draw polygons on it to designate which areas trigger an image swap..

FLASH??

Yeah, but it will be the most CONVOLUTED, BLOATED, WRONGEST CODE EVER ON THE WEB. Not that it hasn't been done.

Flash is a much better, cleaner solution.

It is okay, I agree. I'm just being a stickler. Flash is probably still easier to use than Dreamweaver, though. (I could be totally wrong about this, depending on the previous knowledge base.)

And I like clean HTML, so a simple image embed is much better, to me, than a hundred line of HTML which do the same thing, only not quite as well.

How so? It's pixel-perfect, won't choke if you have javascript (or even images) turned off, won't break according to your browser's quirks, won't do anything wrong at all, actually, except not display if you don't have a Flash plugin. And how long does the average internet user go without installing a Flash plugin? I usually make it about two days on a new computer.

Yeah, you're talking about HOT SPOTS ON AN IMAGE MAP, right? I'm talking about 3 images: a plain state, rollover state and a selected state. Dreamweaver will make HOT SPOTS for you but it won't do this... if so, please provide one example. I have been searching HTML maps for a while now and there is nothing out there.

That's all fine, but you're forgetting the minor issue that mycatisstaringatme needs to actually own or have a demo copy of Flash to do this. Even if this is a one-off thing, it's not even worth downloading a demo version of Flash for... which is around a 60 mb download these days. Maybe mycat has a T3 for all I know, though.

I couldn't possibly agree more. But you're right -- for one thing, just a map with rollovers, just that one thing -- Flash is perfect.

Either way, you're going to be rebuilding something. Solve some arguments here and tell us what tools you have at your disposal.

Do you want US states to turn red or blue or something when you roll over them? If so, can you please make Tennessee blue for me, it would be a personal favor.

I have Flash, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, Photoshop, ImageReady, Fireworks and some other stuff that I don't know how to use very well like BBEdit and Freehand.

Yeah this one's kind of tough, dude. My first instinct would be to use a single image of the entire map for each possible state, but you'd have to preload all those images and even compressing each one down to like 1K you'd still have to load up 100K worth of images, so I don't think that would work. (This is very confusing, since "state" and "map" both have two separate but relevant meanings here!)

Do you REALLY have to show the "selected" state for each region? Or do you get whisked away to another page once you click there? If you don't have to show that, then the above technique would work.

it's pushing it, i realize, and it might possibly be too much to load up. i'd be interested to hear how others would do it.

there are probably good ways involving CSS, hiding layers, etc.

?

Dude, I read the thread! he has Flash. Use Flash, I'm saying. Rebuild it from scratch if you need to -- sounds like he'd need to, anyway.

you'd have to preload all those images and even compressing each one down to like 1K you'd still have to load up 100K worth of images, so I don't think that would work

See? Use Flash.

it's pushing it, i realize, and it might possibly be too much to load up.

See? Use Flash.

OOOooohhhhhhh.

Wait.. Why does it need to be non-Flash? For who?

this'll be and accessibility thing. ever tried navigating around a flash based website with a braille reader?

five-oh-whatever the fuck it is. WEB STANDARDS. A List Apart probably has an answer for you, I'm sure. Eric Meyers does amazing shit with CSS>

My three-month-old PC doesn't have Flash, because Macromedia don't produce one which will run on it.

The real way to do it is with CSS layers and z-index positioning, I bet.