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They were very popular before that. I recall finding great use for them around 97. Easiest way to have complicated graphical navigation.

All was find until you had to define clickable areas as polygons. Urrrrgh.

Image maps were the best. We could have a clickable map of the U.S. that was fast-loading, cross-browser compatible, and did not require a plugin. What's not to like?

Today the way to do that is with javascript libraries like D3.js, which handle both drawing the map and detecting/directing clicks. That was not an option 8 years ago; javascript was too slow.

Imagemaps were fun ages ago - and animating imagemap menus with javascript was even more fun.

No one would bother with such things today when CSS has animation and whatnot.

I actually did, but only with <map>, never <input type=image>.