IIRC the Apple website used to use (client side image maps) them. But I suspect that was Mai my so they could do some research where users actually click on their screen.
fun fact: source maps are used by some Tor onion sites ("dark net") as part of a captcha process without using JavaScript. If you present the user with an image, and ask them to click on a particular part of it, the server can recieve exactly where they clicked and validate if that's correct without using JS at all. (JS is a big no-no on Tor hidden network sites)
That actually makes a lot of sense, and it helps me wrap my head around why the technique exists at all. As someone who didn’t get into web programming until 2015 or so, I didn’t quite understand at first the usefulness of this. But for sites like this built in the 90’s it was a totally different world
The way source maps are used by dark net sites, and the reason it exists, are probably unrelated! I think it was just an early form of using image tiling for big efficiency gains. Now with HTTP2/QUIC you can request many small individual images without much overhead, but back the day there were huge gains by sending one larger image instead of 50 smaller ones. (There's also the pure CSS solution used with image sprites that's between the old web and the current era, but I digress)
There's probably some efficiency to it too. Encoding a dozen images as one and load them in one request will be quicker than 12 separate images each with their own overhead.
Whoa. I remember using client-side image maps in web design in the 90s, although once Photoshop introduced slices (<table> with rollover javascript hovers inlined in your html!), it mostly put an end to that.
I never heard of anyone, ever, using server-side image maps. Not with an Apache server, anyway. Maybe once something with Adobe ColdFusion.
I wonder whether this was sort of am ad-hoc copy protection scheme for these icons?
They usually end up talking to me because some project or career path they were on didn't work out how they were expecting.
I mention this b/c at some point I ask them: "Hey, do you have a blog post or website about this failed project?"
They usually say "yes, but who would want to hear about this??"
Me: "You would be ASTOUNDED at what people find interesting. Success or failure, there is always something to be learned from someone else trying to solve a problem."
Hopefully, we see more of these writeups as they are VERY inspirational (successful stories like this one or not)
I really love that the source-extension icons are all different, and resemble the files contents - .c indentation, .h mostly linear, .s assembly instructions, ".o" bits
i was getting kind of annoyed by all the gender-ism in the first 30 pages... only naked women... this re-balances the equation and i am disarming myself of my pitchfork.
Supported since forever.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
I never heard of anyone, ever, using server-side image maps. Not with an Apache server, anyway. Maybe once something with Adobe ColdFusion.
I wonder whether this was sort of am ad-hoc copy protection scheme for these icons?
Very unfortunate that archive.org doesn't have a copy of it.
They usually end up talking to me because some project or career path they were on didn't work out how they were expecting.
I mention this b/c at some point I ask them: "Hey, do you have a blog post or website about this failed project?"
They usually say "yes, but who would want to hear about this??"
Me: "You would be ASTOUNDED at what people find interesting. Success or failure, there is always something to be learned from someone else trying to solve a problem."
Hopefully, we see more of these writeups as they are VERY inspirational (successful stories like this one or not)
It'd be nice to have some way to browse the pages without constantly hunting for the Next button.
https://www.ibiblio.org/gio/iconbrowser/icons/icons38.html