[vanderZwan]

> The clickable image map with pixel-perfect precision is a marvel of efficiency and have probably necessitated a lot of tedious, manual labor.

I remember reading about image maps back when everyone still thought XHTML was going to be it, and really wanting to use them because they seemed to be so underused yet secretly quit powerful. But they're such a pain.

Imagine if someone made an easy GUI tool for that. Just load an image, overlay some vector shapes, associate shapes with links, spit out either a static site, or plain HTML tags to embed elsewhere.

EDIT: Via the MDN tutorial on image maps[0], I found this[1]. Interesting to see old website tech like that.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/HTML/Howto/Ad...

[1] http://maschek.hu/imagemap/imgmap/

[thexa4]

Dreamweaver was pretty good at this back then.

[CiaranMcNulty]

There were lots of such tools, back in the day!

[Kalium]

> Imagine if someone made an easy GUI tool for that. Just load an image, overlay some vector shapes, associate shapes with links, spit out either a static site, or plain HTML tags to embed elsewhere.

This is an amazing idea! That way, any person with the software could create a website that would work well. It could obsolesce the notion of hand-crafted XHTML entirely!

A system where What You See Is What You Get for the web would be incredible.

Is it perhaps possible that not only are you not the first to think of such, but that such systems have been created and commercialized?

[vanderZwan]

I think that amount of snark is a bit uncalled for.

What you're talking about are kitchen-sink tools, and IIRC the produced output was usually a bloated swamp of tags and classes.

I meant a simple tool that does one thing and one thing only.

Image maps are pretty easy, conceptually. The <map> tag is a list of <areas>, anchored to an image. An <area> is an <a> tag with "shape" and "coords" added to it. The former indicating which of the four different shapes of shapes the area is (circle, rect, poly, and default, which is the whole page minus any other hotspots that are defined), the latter being a list of nrs.

A GUI app for that would just need:

- a way to open an image

- circle, rect and poly drawing primitives to create a new area

- the ability to select drawn areas and fill in the required href and alt fields - the ability to change, reorder, copy and delete created areas

That's something barely above the metal of the underlying tags - it wouldn't add any bloat. It could even be done as a web-app, or a plug-in for your favourite code editor.

And it's not nearly as elaborate or complicated as the tools you are talking about.

[Kalium]

In that case, I expect to see you posting it in a Show HN in about two weeks!

Conceptually, Dreamweaver is simple. In practice, it was kind of a mess.

[txsh]

Well, this guy doesn’t have any manors.