[OpenLayers-Users] identifying map regions/features on the client side

[Graham Carlyle]

Hi

I'm wanting to identify whether a mouse is clicking on (or hovering
over) a region on my OpenLayers map and then do various things in
response based on the identity of the region. (such as showing country
information if you click on a particular country)

I've implemented this by sending an x,y via AJAX off to the server, then
getting the region identifier back and then doing the things in
response. But unfortunately this can be quite slow with network
latencies between the browser and server.

It seems that a more responsive approach would be to do the region hit
calculation client side. 

I'm guessing a Vector layer approach might facilitate this but as I
understand it Vector (SVG/VML) layers aren't capable of showing very
detailed maps and have cross browser "issues".

I've seen a few enticing posts in the archive mentioning the possibility
of adding an imagemap based approach to this sort of problem but nothing
concrete seems to have happened.

So I'm thinking a new layer type might provide this which would use much
the same info as a vector layer uses (GML, KML etc.) but instead of
rendering this vector info it would provide methods to identify the
feature at an x,y location.

Have I missed something? Am i barking up the wrong tree?

cheers,
Graham