images vs imagemaps

[tzigone]

hello,
could you make a performance comparison for images and imagemaps?can you give informatin about page load time measures for those?
i have a logo bannner at the top of my site and on left side there are 3 links which are on an imagemap. i wonder if it is worth to make these 3 images seperate pictures and remove imagemap?

 

[BabyJeffy]

It's a simple issue of file size. Having an imagemap on an image will do very little to alter page load time (the only difference is the actual HTML code... pure text... and I doubt you have a significant amount of that to make it a problem).

Think of the overhead of using 3 small images (as well as the reduced banner image). You will need 3 more lines of code to define the images, the browser will require to open 3 more connections to the server to get the images, the file size of the 3 images themselves (plus the banner) will most likely be larger than if they were combined into just the banner (you have overheads in the image itself like headers etc).

I would leave it as it is, unless you gain something from changing it... and imho you are not going to gain anything on the page load time.

Jeff

 

[BabyJeffy]

tzigone,

Did you resolve this to your satisfaction? I'd appreciate an update if only to know what your final findings and decision was.

Jeff

 

[tzigone]

hi,
as a matter of fact i was interested in this subject because it was my task on our project. However my duty has changed and i cannot consider about images much. However your explanation seems logical to me. What i will do is to seperate images and look file sizes in the near future.
thank you.