Image Maps – When Not To Use CSS

I don’t remember anyone asking my opinion on this, but apparently over the last few years, image maps became out of favor.  I haven’t had to do anything remotely close to image maps for years now, but I still would have liked to be consulted. As I understand it, the cool kids are now using CSS image maps.  Though I’m a little insulted and bitter, I don’t want anyone to scoff when viewing my source so today I attempted to conform to the masses. 

I did this in spite of the small hurdle I encountered.  It appears that CSS image maps only provide support for rectangular areas where traditional image  maps support polygons.  Considering the fact that my little brother asked for help creating a map for an image with diagonal text, the polygon support would be nice.  Oh well.

I opted to go with the “new way” even though it didn’t make a lot of sense.  In the end, I needed to define twice as many areas and write a heck of a lot more code which produced a less-than-perfect CSS image map.  In this case, the old-school method would have been better, but at least I learned something (perhaps a lesson.)

Here’s to the good ol’ days and the ol’ school image map and hoping I never have to create a map again… 

 If you are interested in CSS image maps (You might as well be.  They work most of the time, I suppose), here’s one of the best examples I could find.