chrismorgan 14 hours ago

> My first thought was to embed anchors into the external map SVG: […]

> This approach is problematic. Those anchors are only active when SVG is inline and don’t work with an <img> element.

No, this approach is fine: you just need to use <object data=…> instead of <img src=…>. <object> is the correct choice for embedding interactive SVG.

But you probably do want the SVG to be inline anyway, because it will load faster and is in this case actively the content of the page; which is the technical decision he ended up at, though perhaps for partly the wrong reason.

(There’s also <iframe>.)

ag8 14 hours ago

wow, I used to make so many games with image maps back when I first learned HTML. One still survives: https://andrew.fi/beowulf/game/

  • mikeocool 9 hours ago

    I feel like you were ahead of the trend with the visual style in this game.

  • bni 14 hours ago

    Thanks for posting this.

    I met the dragon and died I think.

    • chrismorgan 14 hours ago

      There is no way to defeat the evil dragon Hrathogwar. View the page sources to more easily traverse the URL graph, and confirm there is no escape. You can wander back and forth forever, but if you try to progress, to make Hrothgar happy, you get stuck.

danhite 10 hours ago

for those of you using something like their technique of opacity animating a clip-path region from one look to another upon ~click ...

if you wish to be visually kind to safari users you can eliminate the default gray selection indication flash animation safari does upon a tap activation with just a tiny bit of webkit-only css , for example ...

#links { -webkit-tap-highlight-color : transparent ; }

added to the css of their codepen fixes it (without causing any issues for other/std browsers afaik)

seabass 12 hours ago

> Anchors positioned absolutely over my map wouldn’t solve the pixel-based positioning problem or give me the irregular-shaped clickable areas I wanted. Anchors within an external SVG wouldn’t work either.

If you're trying something like this and irregular-shaped clickable areas are not a concern (like if only the numbered circles from the article's example would be clickable) then absolutely positioned anchors can be made to work. The trick is to use js to apply a css scale transformation to a relatively positioned parent container whenever the underlying image changes size.

  • abanana 9 hours ago

    My thought when reading that in the article was (in cases where, as you said, irregular-shaped clickable areas are not a concern): why do we need pixel-based positioning? What's wrong with percentage-based positioning and sizing? I did exactly that a couple of years ago, and it worked as expected.

deanc 6 hours ago

I've spent five minutes now, to no avail, trying to find a link to this website.

  • bigwheeler 6 hours ago

    I think I read somewhere else that it is not publicly launched yet, but should be very soon.

M95D 14 hours ago

This is all because of web standards playing catch-up with implementations instead of the other way around.

notarealllama 14 hours ago

TFA takes us on this journey and then at the end, "Image maps ended up not working for us" without telling us what they did. My money is on JavaScript for that "expressive" aspect of the hover.

  • chrismorgan 14 hours ago

    The last third describes exactly what he did.