I had the same thought. I remember exporting image-based webpages in Macromedia Fireworks using HTML maps. No reason they shouldn't work today, even if they carry the same problems now as they did then (image-based websites are massive).

What IDEs have a GUI for creating image maps anymore? Last one I remember using was in Macromedia Dreamweaver.

> image-based websites are massive

With the huge gains we've made in image optimization since <map>s were popular this isn't always true anymore.

That's more due to the huge gains in javascript bloat offsetting the cost of images.

No it's due to image optimization. 5 bloated apps can easily be smaller than 1 bad gif.

AFAICT, there's not a way to get those nice hover effects with a <map>, at least not without a bunch of JS.

Yeah, my first thought was <map>, then I moused over it and noticed how utterly trivial this would be to re-style in comparison.

This is a good approach, I think. It's kinda fine-tuned for reMarkable output, as it's mostly pure black or white pixels, but clearly they're fine with that. And the end result works quite well, and seems as easy or easier to implement.

This is all also kinda made moot by there being a link to an excellent transcript at the bottom. Accessibility needs are better covered by a straightforward alternate page than <map> alone.

Not sure if I triggered some sort of race with fast mouse movement or my mouse being over the link before it appeared or something, but for me on Firefox on Linux, the blue color went away when I hovered my mouse over a link. I'm not sure if that's really a benefit; it honestly confused me and made me think that I wasn't actually hovering over a link at first, since that's not how traditional links work.

(Also on Firefox on Linux)

I can't begin fathom how that could happen. It's not some fancy JS thing, it's a very simple CSS effect:

    a:hover {
        filter: opacity(0.5) !important;
    }
    
    .post a {
        background-color: #35c;
        mix-blend-mode: screen;
        position: absolute;
        display: block;
    }

Do you maybe have a user-stylesheet that overrides something about links? But I can't think of anything that makes sense that wouldn't also break the non-hovering version too.

Does opacity() combined with mix-blend-mode maybe not work right on your box? I'm not sure why it wouldn't, but you can convince me of just about anything by saying "Firefox does weird things on some GPUs".

Blending stuff is a particularly unreliable part of the web platform, because GPU drivers are astonishingly bad, and a lot of the functionality is poorly exercised. The situation has improved enormously in the past decade as a few things have started to use the GPU and so there’s been more attention to it all. For Firefox, the Quantum Render project ironed out almost all the problems so that bugs are now fairly rare. For web content in general and especially in other browsers, I suspect that Google Maps switching to WebGL single-handedly drove most of the improvement that has happened (even when it comes to identifying and blacklisting bad drivers and deliberately falling back to a software implementation).

But quite seriously, rejoice that you’re using Firefox. It has very few blending issues in general. I’ve found the Chromium family to be vastly buggier in this area, and I’ve learned when doing almost anything with filters and blending to develop with Chromium—previously I developed with Firefox and everything would just work, and then I’d test it in Chromium and discover some important bug or fundamental undocumented limitation in Chromium which meant I had to start again with a different approach, e.g. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=992398 where a perfectly normal combination of things just stopped rendering the page after 8,192 pixels (which isn’t all that much); or for something more recent (earlier this year) look at the source of https://temp.chrismorgan.info/2022-10-03-hand-drawn-with-lin... and see some of the compromises I made for Chromium.

I do have some custom CSS stylesheets installed, but none of them seem to be active on that URL. I did do some messing with my GTK and Gnome shell themes a few weeks ago, and I noticed that it strangely seemed to have some parts of the NY Times crossword site use a dark background where they didn't before, so maybe that's affecting it somehow?

I don't know if this is the same way image maps were made in the early 90s but that's what I immediately thought of too.

<map> was introduced in HTML 3.2 in 1997. The other technique I often saw was to cut the image into a grid of separate image files. They would look to the user as if they were a single image, but you could hyperlink some of the images so the effect was that parts of the overall image were hyperlinked and some weren't. Developers came up with all kinds of interesting tricks in those days!

My first websites were built like this. I'd design PSDs and then slice them into images that I'd place in tables. I completely forgot about that approach!

When I clicked the first link in the article, I though it was an image map too.

Map is no good for SEO or WCAG though.

Are images of handwritten text good for that?

Maybe there's an opportunity here with on-the-fly OCR. Imagine if a screen reader could really read.

I have to imagine some can, as the article mentions on the fly OCR of handwriting to generate the transcription, and I can select text from the handwriting on my phone (iOS 15 currently).

I was initially surprised to see it’s not transparent text overlaying the image, but apparently the text recognition is actually that good.

Safari already has this.

Safari has Live Text; that's just Google Lens with less features

On the fly for each end user loading seems wasteful, why reprocess each time?

No, they aren't.

<map> and <area> are fine for a11y if marked up responsibly (they accept ARIA attrs and alternative text for example). I learned Amazon still uses them regularly!

That's interesting, do you know what Amazon uses them for?

I've seen them in promotional carousels. One large bg image, each individual product is it's own <area>