Esoteric HTML - ismap vs CSS

Terence Eden · 14 Sept 2026

Terence Eden did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
Attribute behavior that depends on CSS layout size rather than an element's natural or declared size is a design trap web authors should avoid relying on.

Their wordsBasically, what I'm saying is, don't use ismap unless you're absolutely sure that there will be no CSS shenanigans. Even then, it probably isn't worth the risk.

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