> 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?
This depends on where the server keeps the image map files. If they are
kept right beside the HTML documents (below the document ROOT). Then you
should be able to rebuild the URL for it from the HREF and retrieve it as
a text file. However, if the server stores these files somewhere that is
not accessible by the world (ie if it gets the map file location through
conf files), then your SOL.
Here is an example that someone uses on one of our servers that works this
way.
<A HREF="http://www-athrec.mcmaster.ca/cgi-bin/imagemap/macwbb/bball.map">
<IMG SRC="team2.gif" ISMAP></A>
Just take out the cgi-bin/imagemap/ and you've got the URL for the Map file.
> 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.
This would probably work, but I would not be impressed if someone hit our
site a couple hundered times just to get some URLs.
I guess this is an instance where Client side Imagemaps have a distinct
advantage.
Cees Hek
Computing & Information Services Email: hekc@mcmaster.ca
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada