Re: beyond IMAGEMAP

Rick Troth ([email protected])
Tue, 10 May 1994 08:52:24 -0500 (CDT)

Thanks, David, for starting this thread!

> The IMAGEMAP (ISMAP) facility allows the pixel coordinates of the
> mouseclick to be interpreted. Some document is served or some parameter
> is passed to a server script depending on the location of the mouse click
> in the image.
>
> This facility is extremely powerful and allows very creative ways to
> serve information. However we are finding that for many applications
> we need more than a simple point location on the image. ...

While we're on this thread, it would be useful if the
method that the server employed to receive those parameters NOT imply
an overloading of the UNIX file path. I'm thinking:

/xxxbin/imagemap,/~user/usersmap?x,y

where /xxxbin/imagemap gets (fully resolved) ~user/usersmap
as a parameter or environment variable and then also gets x and y.
Does this make sense? Not sure if I've expressed the idea well.

The CMS HTTPD (the piped one, not CERN's) will parse comma-
separated values before the '?' and pass them as parms to the script.
Then anything after the '?' (search args, form responses, whatever)
are fed as input to the script (wether GET or PUT, the script
works the same way). I know that at least one other server uses
something like this (semicolon in that case). Thoughts? 

-- 
"There's just some things that numbers can't measure" - Bob Bennett 
Rick Troth <[email protected]>, Rice University, Information Systems