Wasn't it Le Forgeron who wrote:
>Pander scripsit::
>> 
>> This is a feature request to have functionality in povray (or an external
>> tool employing porvay) to generate a HTML map that contains areas that are
>> masks for object contours. This would look like:
>> 
>> <map name=''>
>>   <area href='' shape='rect' coords='10,20,30,40'/>
>>   <area href='' shape='circle' coords='50,60,5'/>
>>   <area href='' shape='poly' coords='80,90,100,110,120,130,140,150'/>
>> </map>
>> 
>> This would need a very simple one bit countour trace per (specified or
>> specified type of) object and approximate the resulting contour by a rect,
>> circle or poly. Off course overlapping objects will each have thier own
>> contour where hidden parts, because of overlapping, will not be included in
>> the resulting map area.
>
>Even if tracing pixel per pixel is the easiest way, the NP problem
>is the aggregation of same object pixel into a shape.

It may not be necessary to do sophisticated aggregation. Modern browsers
are capable of handling huge numbers of separate elements. I've not seen
it done with imagemap components, but I've seen pages that use thousands
of small rectangular clickable <div>s, many of them single pixels, and
they're blindingly fast.

The downside is that the information would be quite large. On the pages
I mentioned above, the <div>s were generated in place in Javascript, and
was blindingly fast, but for this purpose the information would need to
be loaded from the website, and therefore slow down the page loading.

-- 
Mike Williams
Gentleman of Leisure

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