I've been asked to collate a list as possible of the modern uses for Image Maps.
When they first came into being, web-designers in the 90s used them as one of the first ways to create a more immersive experience, but now a-days they can be linked to javascript and jquery to perform all sorts of "exciting" tasks. Many of their possible uses have been superseded by flash, but I'm trying to find recent implementations, that use image maps in a really neat way, along with their urls.
The best I can do is the map highlight plugin for jquery, though sadly it's recent releases don't appear to work with IE8. If it did, it would be most impressive.
Hopefully someone has written some image map work themselves and could show it here. Many thanks.
ScrollMap
I have not used an Image Map in ages... where I can get away with, I just absolutely position links over a background image.
One thing Image Maps can do that CSS and XHTML can't do (reliably) is polygons and circles. You could argue you could place a few hundred 1px links to make a circle - but that solution is ugly, bloated and more trouble than just using an Image Map.
Related
How does one implement functionality similar to the one shown in this gif in a website?
Specifically, the part where the user clicks on a (non-rectangular) area of the image and that area then changes colour.
A long, long time ago when the internet was still young, there was something called image maps. Is that still the preferred approach? I heard about svg, does that provide this type of functionality? What about canvas?
I don't know about image maps to get them in this shape of hit areas.
But I recommend using canvas for these type of applications.
You have multiple options for doing that, being image maps one of them. However, I wouldn't do it with it, nowadays, there are better solutions.
You can either use canvas, as suggested before, for example using a canvas library like http://fabricjs.com/ or, maybe a bit easier, using SVG elements.
The benefit of SVG is that they render as normal DOM elements in a website, so you can debug then in the inspector, attach normal click events to them, style them using CSS, etc.
multiple options for this.
SVGs + CSS
CANVAS animations
FLASH( wouldn't recommend this option.,Pretty outdated)
Plain html css (But this wont be customisable in future for different shapes, a lot of time consuming when compared to other ways and confusing unless written with good documentation.)
html+css way: you can always make most of the geometrical shapes with css and html. But, curves we have svgs to go for and use css/svg transitions for visuals
I have a sort of setup like... google maps. It has nothing to do with maps but the mechanism seems to be similar.
I have an image ~300MB and the client can drag the picture around having different parts of it in view in the browser. I want to load only the specific parts of the image which the user is looking at, and unload the parts which are out of view (to save RAM).
I thought of breaking the image in 15X15px chunks and load the correct chunks each time but I can't seem to wrap my mind around which technique should I use to actually perform this task.
Any suggestions?
Google Maps breaks up their images (including streetview etc) into smaller chunks. I've seen a lot of people use their own images WITH the Google Maps technology to create their own maps of whatever (one, for example, is a fantasy world/web game I can remember)
Perhaps, instead of reinventing the wheel, inspect the other guys' wheel and see if you can use the same technology to create what you need. GTA for example: http://www.gta4.net/map/
This should get you started: https://developers.google.com/maps/
Google maps api: https://developers.google.com/maps/ seems to allow everything I need but it is clumsy and limited for the types of things I want to do.
It's like solving the problem backwards.. figuring out how to work with the map, and the hiding the map layer... which is... doing a lot of work for nothing.
With that, that seemed to be the best solution out there until I cam acroos this:
Panojs
http://www.dimin.net/software/panojs/
This seems to be super easy to use and quite flexible.
or Zoom.it which is based on SeaDragon which is also super easy to use!
http://www.zoom.it/
Cheers
I have been developing an application on google chrome, and I've been using the MarkerWithLabel library, which i believe is written by google developers. I am using a little over 100 markers on the map and it seemed to be pretty smooth until i checked in firefox (and lets not even mention IE). It is pretty damn laggy in FF. Any way to optimize it?
http://jsfiddle.net/zDTNS/2 Here is a sample in jsfiddle
To clarify, having 200 regular markers works fine. The problem shows up when using MarkerWithLabel
Generally speaking the best way to optimize any Google maps application is using a clustering technique. As the application loads more and more markers the client-side rendering over-head will only increase. The addition of labels only compounds the issue.
A number of clustering techniques exist and are simple to implement, I'd suggest starting with this article: https://developers.google.com/maps/articles/toomanymarkers.
Edit Leaving above in place in case anyone doesn't have the same spec requirement, but similar issue.
My only other suggestion would be to turn off the labels when above a certain zoom level? This will at least alleviate some of the worst of the rendering issues.
Edit After doing a bit of research the library introduced here has been shown to have far more favorable performance characteristics than markerWithLabel. It relies on a html canvas though so is ie9+.
After spending 2 weeks researching and trying all sorts of methods, most suggested on here, I arrived to the conclusion that there just is no way to optimize at the moment. For some reason firefox struggles when there are divs on top of the map and keeping them in sync. The performance on the latest firefox was almost the same as IE8.
I found that having a ton of google markers does not cause any lagging, but divs do. What I ended up doing was create a server side function that converts text to png. When initializing the google marker, you make the icon url TextToImage.aspx?text=Hello&size=13
Then I set the anchor of the new marker to (15, 15) and that became my new 'label'. I added some click and mouseover listeners to the label marker and voila! Insane improvement to performance.
If you only want a couple of characters inside a pin, another alternative is:
https://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chst=d_map_pin_letter&chld=${displayCharacters}|${pinColorHex}|${fontColorHex}
Check this example.
Is there a decent non-flash replacement for Google's GeoMap? I'm trying to "push" redraws, but because it's flash it has to run back to Google, render a flash object, and then replace it.
Google now has the GeoChart which is the replacement to GeoMap. It creates an SVG and has more flexibility in terms of customization such as changing the background color of the map, etc, etc.
http://code.google.com/apis/chart/interactive/docs/gallery/geochart.html
I am afraid that there isn't a free map API as good as this and easy to use.
I've also scoured the web for something I could use that isn't flash but I suppose we have to wait a little while until html 5 gets going something will jump out of the dev bushes with a canvas tag hopefully.
I hope this answers your question. I'll keep looking though. I've been at it for 3 months.
A Google employee just told me they're working on an HTML5 version of the GeoMap API, but it won't be available for a few months.
As for a replacement, this is the closest I could find, but doesn't offer interactivity, rollovers, or subregions: http://joncom.be/code/excanvas-world-map/
Check out http://jvectormap.owl-hollow.net/
It is svg, fully compatible across browsers and has almost everything that google geomaps offers.mit is very easy to implement, more like a jquery plugin amd feeds from json as well.
I'm looking into a solution for work, where you have a two page spread of the book to preview. Either side of this, you can hover in the corner to create a pseudo-flip and then click the mouse button to actually turn the page. I know there is many Flash solutions out there, but in this case we cannot use it... So we are looking for a possible solution that can work across all major browsers (yes, including IE6)...
I looked a few canvas solutions, but with Google's canvas extension for IE, these will terribly slow. So was thinking about an SVG/VML solution, like Raphael Javascript library. This could be good, but then trying to look into how to code this, without examples, could be a challenge with the time constraint.
Is there a solution out there that fits (or almost fits) this problem?
How about the SVG Flip solution by Paul Brunt? It seems to do exactly what you ask for, using svg and javascript.
Here are a few demos for different browser generations:
Book flip via CSS3 transforms
Book flip via CSS2.1 absolute positioning
Book flip via DHTML