Haha. No worries man. I actually thought “wait, maybe this person is using my post as dummy text”. That is obviously TOTALLY fine.

But people had ganked stuff in the past, so yours inspired me to make that tweet.

But you’re totally fine, no worries. Thanks for the heads up though!

That spammy website is mine. I was just testing out developing a WordPress page. Didn’t mean to copy your blog. Sorry about that.
I hope you don’t mind if I posted your blog as a link. I am learning WordPress and collecting knowhow about it, for my own reference. Thanks a lot for your cool blog.

Image maps would definitely get the job done. They may even be faster/easier to do. Unfortunately, it isn’t always about what’s simple and quick, usually our work has to flexible and accessible as well.

Using a CSS based technique may seem as if its accomplishing the same goal as an image, but it’s actually doing much more. With an image map your overall placement is locked in, you’d have to change the actual image, and all of the corresponding coordinates if you decide to move things around. With a CSS sprite, you’re actually free to reposition the links. You could easily change the margins or the padding, making your navigation wider, or shorter, you could even make it vertical sidebar navigation.

Additionally, the sprite technique is compliant with all modern standards. Image mapping techniques are quite old, and are unfortunately are usually done improperly. This can lead to problems in other browsers, invalid code, or (more importantly) bloated HTML files that would actually take longer to load. There are in fact, some ways to make image maps with 100% valid code, but they actually end up being more complicated than this technique.

Thanks for the input though, it’s always good to think about alternate solutions to a problem. There are definitely times when image maps ARE the answer. Like with an actual geographic map image, you may need the links to fit a country’s border, etc.

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