border - Set a background color on the HTML <area> element?

Question

Is there any way to set a background color for the HTML <area> element? I'm creating an image map where certain sections of the map will pop up a tooltip when you mouse over them, and I thought it would be cool (and convenient) if I could set a background color for the <area> elements so you could see where they were located over the image.

I've tried both background-color and border, and neither have any effect - the <area> elements remain "invisible." I'm assuming this is because <area> is a self-closing tag and so it doesn't actually have any dimensions? But forcing a height and width didn't help, either.

Answer 1

It doesn't seem possible.

You might want to look into this jQuery plugin:

http://plugins.jquery.com/project/maphilight

Here's an example:

http://davidlynch.org/js/maphilight/docs/demo_usa.html#