PC Training & Consulting Weblog

Tour NM Photo website

March 01, 2005

Check out this page and those linked to it:

ABQjournal TourNM: TourNM-Default

Your thoughts?

My thoughts ...

Is there a problem with that image?

Try clicking anywhere on that image. What happens and why?

That is an imagemap gone wrong. Various areas of that image are clickable ("hotspots"). In a good example, it should be more obvious which areas are distinct; clicking on different areas should lead to different pages (see time.gov).

This imagemap links to a server-side process written in Perl (note the .pl in the URL).

Before you click on the "Click here" link, notice how long this page is. Why? Do you see those little dots way down at the bottom? If you look at the code, you'll see this old technique for "pre-loading" some graphics, so that subsequent pages will seem to load faster. The order isn't quite right (the next graphic loaded is the next graphic seen). It may be counter-productive to pre-load so many graphics; we could preload a couple with each subsequent page.

Then there is the popup window for the graphics. The code sizes the window, why doesn't it size it correctly? More than likely, the designer uses a higher resolution than we are.