Status Bar Explanation Recipe

Purpose

This recipe displays a message in the status bar (the gray bar at the bottom of the Web viewer) alerting the user that the graphic is an image map. Putting the message in the status bar allows you to use the entire contents pane to display a dialog box or a visualization of a process.

Sample

(Look at the status bar for the message.)

Function

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
function moreInfo(dialogName)
{
window.status="This image shows the " + dialogName + " dialog. Click on image elements for specific details.";
}
</SCRIPT>

where

Call within the element

<IMG NAME="dialogName" SRC="picture.gif" onLoad="moreInfo(this.name)">

Note that the SRC property can use any filename; it need not be the same as the image’s NAME property, although it should refer to the same image.

Possible modifications

Use this recipe to display other information in the status bar by substituting an onClick event handler for the onLoad handler used here (onLoad works with images and the document body; onClick works with virtually any HTML element)..