well, it may be a bit more complicated than that...
> From: Mark Phillips [mailto:mbp@geomtech.com]
> > Is there a way to include URL's / links into a map?
> > For example: the user clicks on an object, symbol or label
> and the click
> > triggers the link.
>
> It should be possible to do this in a mapscript script (php,
> perl, ...)
> by detecting the click in the script, and having the script send
> an http "Location:" header back to the browser to cause it to go to
> whatever URL you want the clicked-on object to correspond to.
>
let's say I am mapping houses... and I want the resulting map to have an
embedded imagemap so that when I click (or, better yet, hover) on a house a
window pops up with some attributes for that house... in other words, I have
streamed the attributes along with the map all of it to the client. Since I
don't know where each house is going to be, I can't really construct an
imagemap. I mean, it can be done... its just not easy... I would have to
preprocess all the features in a result set, get their bounding boxes, and
then generate an imagemap from those boxes before sending all of it to the
client...
I think you're really looking for a smart client to be able to do that for
you. I don't want people to think I only ever post to this list to say look
at GeoTools (www.geotools.org) as I think mapserver is an excellent piece
of software and we use it every day in our work in the Centre for
Computational Geography. But I really think some of the people on this list
are trying to push it way beyond its limits. Maybe this is just because I'm
a sad old unix hacker and I like one tool to do one job and do it well
rather than bloating a tool so it becomes jack of all trades and master of
none.