Paul Graham's blog: Curious choice of HTML for building the side panel

by j1nd4L on 2/13/2022, 11:08:14 AM with 3 comments
I was reading an essay on Paul Graham's blog[1] and the side panel[2] seemed erringly pixelated even on my MBP. I inspected the web page and found that the whole side panel is infact a gif[3] and the different links on the page are linked using the coordinates of the image.

Example for the first link: <area shape="rect" coords="0,0,67,21" href="index.html">

TBH, I did not know this is something which can be done in HTML but that got me curious on how it ended up on PG's blog given many limitations it has :)

[1]: http://paulgraham.com/ [2]: https://i.imgur.com/uo254ts.png [3]: https://s.yimg.com/aah/paulgraham/quotes-1.gif

  • by Beltalowda on 2/13/2022, 12:02:42 PM

    It's just old; back in the day HTML had very little graphic capabilities, and loading multiple images was comparatively slow (think 56k connections). So you'd load a single image and then subdivide that in clickable areas with image maps (which is what this is called).

  • by ssss11 on 2/13/2022, 11:16:56 AM

    Isn’t it an image map? No one uses them any more I don’t think but they had their time.

  • by foldr on 2/13/2022, 1:02:03 PM

    As other commenters have said, this used to be a very common technique.

    https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ma...