I previously asked the question: how can you retrieve an image map file from a
web server? (the ascii file with the urls and coordinates). Someone answered
that web servers do not allow you to retrieve this file. This leads me to
wonder how a robot can descend the document tree of a web site if, as is the
case for many sites, the path to lower level documents is through image maps
and not through explicit hyperlinks?
You could interrogate the map completely if you know its dimensions, but I
don't know how to get the dimensions. But this would require many, many queries
of the image map to find its hotspots.
Thanks for any help.