alt Hacker Newsoh man <map> and <area> yes kids today just don't know the pain we went through.
this is back when every single byte mattered and saving a few MB was the difference between a good user experience and a bad one.
for those that never used this, you would do something like
<img src="funnycats.jpg" usemap="#funnycats-map">
<!-- the map defines clickable zones --> <map name="funnycats-map"> <shape="rect" coords="34,44,270,350" href="cats.html"> </map>
most ppl used something like Dreamweaver but bad-asses would do their own coordinates.
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My web dev experience began right before ES6, when browsers still did not do parallel asset loads and so spritesheets were common
Why could you not have defined elements overlayed using high z index that were clickable, like invisible divs?
The only time I ever needed dreamweaver: I found an open source imagemap of the US states and I needed to scale it to match my background image of the US provided by an art director. Dreamweaver let me see all the <area>s easily. Maybe there was another way to do it. Fun fact: the art director wanted states to grow on hover, but acquiesced to having them change color when I pointed out how impossible it would be to click on Rhode Island if you'd hovered Massachusetts first. I don't even know how I would have done the grow effect, tbh.