Rubber-Band Box Zooming

[Camden Daily]

Hello all.  I'm developing a php/mapscript mapping application, and
I'm trying to implement zooming where the user clicks and drags a box
on the map that they would like to zoom to.

What's making this tricky is that I'd also like to make hidden <div>s
pop up over specific locations on the map when the mouse moves over
them.

The popup stuff isn't too tricky using maparea and  onmouseovers.
I've also used the rosa applet to get the click-and-drag zooming
working nicely.

However, trying to combine these two things seems impossible for a few reasons:

1) There's no way to tag an applet with an areamap for the pop ups.
2) Even scrapping the areamap and using pure javascript to track the
mouse position won't work, because mouse events aren't triggered over
applets, and even if they were, it would be impossible to then draw
the divs over the applet (as applets are always 'in front').

I've looked at other apps like rosa (jBox, dBox), but they seem to be
java applets as well .

I think the only way I'm going to accomplish this will be to either
find an applet that supports location popups, or to find a jBox/dBox
like application that's pure JavaScript (or write my own, if there's a
way to draw the boxes in javascript).

If anyone has suggestions, I'd love to hear 'em.