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Are image maps deprecated in (x)HTML?
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The bottom line is that if you want or need to use an image map, they are still a part of the standard, and they do have valid uses. Just try to make them as accessible and easy to use as you can.
Image maps, however, are not natively responsive. That means that if the image scale needs adjustments due to a browser's window being resized or the page being viewed on a mobile device, the image map and its clickable area will not scale down with the screen size.
Two types of image maps are client side and server side. Client side image maps provide multiple active regions through the browser and they can be made accessible relatively easily. Server side image maps require a mouse to be used and transfer click data to the server for processing.
The intention of an image map is to provide an easy way of linking various parts of an image without dividing the image into separate image files.
It is in the HTML 5 draft spec.
It also appears in the XHTML strict DTD:
<!ELEMENT MAP - - ((%block;) | AREA)+ -- client-side image map --> In short - it is part of both specs and is not deprecated.
Some people do not like image maps because they perceive them as not very accessible or discoverable, and as such there are other markup/css/javascript techniques that work better.
The map element doesn't appear in the obsolete section of the HTML 5 spec either. In fact, several obsolete features have a recommendation to use image maps instead.
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For the record, it is also still part of XHTML1.1 Strict with one change
On the a and map elements, the name attribute has been removed in favor of the id attribute
In the now dead XHTML2 any element could have been an Image Map, effectively making a separate element for it superfluous, which is the reason it was no longer part of the specification.
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