Are HTML Image Maps still used?

Question

Do people still use the old HTML Image Maps? The ones with:

Answer 1

Yes, it still used

An image map allows a user to hyperlink to many pages by clicking different parts of an image.Simply by using image map we create lists of coordinates relating to a specific area of the same image and give the hyperlink to a different location. By using this within a single image we give multiple links.

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Answer 2

Image Maps are still in HTML5 specifications, supported by all browsers.

They can be adapted to responsive design using jQuery RWD Image Maps: https://github.com/stowball/jQuery-rwdImageMaps

It detects and automatically resize the image maps coordinates.

It's also available for Wordpress developers as plugin: http://wordpress.org/plugins/responsive-image-maps/

Simple and effective solution.

Answer 3

They are in the HTML5 specification, so they will not get deprecated.

You can still freely use them, they certainly still have their place in web development. Or I could say, those rare occasions exist where you can best solve something with an image map.

Answer 4

An alternative solution to using CSS or image maps would be to make use of SVG graphics embedded into the HTML dom.

One tutorial on how to achieve mouseover effects using this technique is described in this tutorial: http://www.petercollingridge.co.uk/data-visualisation/mouseover-effects-svgs

The key takeaway being that SVG elements also trigger traditional dom events including onmouseover and onmouseout.

Answer 5

While I rarely see them used on modern websites anymore, they do seem to be used by my clients in their email campaigns. However, I've noticed, and confirmed that there are some scaling issues with the coordinate system on mobile devices.

** I know this thread is old, I was just doing some additional research into this for a recent email campaign issue and thought it may help someone else down the line.

3rd party edit

The question on litmus.com on image map support is from 04/2014

Image maps do not support ALT tags, when images aren't loaded the ALT text isn't displayed in some clients.

Image map usage generally results in using large images which can cause deliverability issues and hinder download speed (especially important to mobile users).

And most importantly, The iOS (iphone/ipad) doesn't scale the image map link coordinates when the image is scaled which breaks the links. Since iOS represents a large majority of email opens (iPhone + iPad = 38% via http://emailclientmarketshare.com/) this is important.

Answer 6

Yes, people do still use image maps. An alternative would be to position elements using absolute positioning and CSS but that's not necessarily better. It also doesn't allow you to have shapes like in image maps