We have experimented with various sorts of indexing. Bearing in mind that words are going out of fashion in many circles, we may want to present an index as some sort of picture. In some circumstances, two dimensions may work much better than one; selecting places from a map, for instance, is a natural example. The objective here is to let the client user click on images or areas of images and to deduce from the position of the cursor at the time of the click what she wants to do next.
Recently, browsers have improved in capability, and client-side mapping (built into the returned HTML document) is becoming more popular. If you want to use server-side image maps, however, Apache provides support. The httpd.conf in ... /site.imap is as follows:
User webuser Group webgroup ServerName www.butterthlies.com DocumentRoot /usr/www/APACHE3/site.imap/htdocs AddHandler imap-file map ImapBase map ImapMenu Formatted
The three lines of note are the last. AddHandler
sets up ImageMap handling using files with the
extension .map. When you access the site you see
the following:
Index of / Parent Directory bench.jpg bench.map bench.map.bak default.html left.html right.html sides.html things
This index could be made simpler and more elegant by using some of the directives mentioned earlier. In the interest of keeping the Config file simple, we leave this as an exercise for the reader.
Click on sides.html to see the action. The picture of the bench is presented: if you click on the left you see this:
Index of /things Parent Directory 1 2 3
If you click on the righthand side, you see:
you like to sit on the right
If you click outside one of the defined areas (as in ... /htdocs/sides.html), you see:
You're clicking in the wrong place