Javascript Indexed or Not?

Image Map Info Boxes

[old_expat]

I have some images on 2 different websites on which I want to pop-up information boxes on mouseover / hover events. Some of the information boxes contain images.

Wekit

I have managed to do a fair job of presenting the info using webkit code. The problem is, at least in the way I have approached it, it's not a true image map. The code I am using positions (floats?) "links" at various points above the image. That actually makes the image a bit messy. However, the information is in divs, so should be easily indexed by search engines.

Another problem with the webkit code, some of the images have dozens of "links" and positioning is relative so divs need to be positioned through trial and error.

Javascript

I have also found a javascript that seems to work on all browsers back to IE6. The spots on the image are much easier to create, but I wonder if the information gets indexed. It is coded as such:

<area shape="rect" coords="11,11,11,11" href="#" class="showTip L1" alt="text">

<area shape="rect" coords="11,11,11,11" href="#" class="showTip L2" alt="text">


dw_Tooltip.content_vars = {
 L1: 'Content is here;,
 L2: 'Content is here;,
}

Webkit is open source, but I have to pay a licensing fee for the JavaScript = $35 for 1 website, $70 for multiple.

Price is not a big deal, but content indexing is.

I appreciate any help and guidance.

[whoisgregg]

This one is difficult to judge.

The rule of thumb with typical spiders is that they would only see "text" because it's in the alt attribute. But even that's iffy because they might ignore alt text in an <area> tag.

For Google, it's safe to say that they are running the javascript that the page pulls for a sufficient length of time to populate the page (and do whatever shady things spammers do like add redirects, hide text, etc.) then parse the resulting output as the true page.

But tooltips would only appear if they were simulating mouseover events for all the objects in the page. I don't know if any testing has been done on this.

Which, of course, brings us to the true answer, which is that you'd *need* to test a case like this to determine if it is being indexed.

[penders]

What do you mean by "webkit"? (Your own HTML/JavaScript ?)

dw_Tooltip.content_vars = { 
  L1: 'Content is here;, 
  L2: 'Content is here; 
}

You could populate your content_vars object as the page loads, from your DIVs created using your "webkit code". Like you say, the DIVs content would be indexed in the usual way. However, when the page loads, hide the DIVs and copy the content to your content_vars object.