My website makes extensive use of image-maps. The images are of pages from a medieval manuscript. The mouseOver event of the AREA tags has a tooltip attached to it, which displays a modern typographic transcription of the ancient script for the line the mouse is hovering over.

I just checked my website out on the iPad at the Apple store. The iPad is many respects a joy to use, however, I am wondering about Apple's mapping of the mouseEvents to the finger-touch events. Apple probably had a good reason for doing things as they did, but their choices seem counterintuitive an overly complicated to me.

Specifically, the iPad Safari browser clearly was responding to both fingerDown and fingerTap, and in different ways. When I tapped an area of the image-map, the tooltip wired to the mouse-over event pf the AREA tag was displayed, and remained visible until I tapped somewhere else. When I held my finger down on an area of the image-map, the area changed color. So if iPad Safari detects a mouseOver eventhandler, it executes the mouseOver code and apparently prevents the "click" event from propagating, so that if you also have something wired to the click event, it doesn't work? Is that right?

But more importantly, why isn't fingerDown the iPad-Safari counterpart for mouseOver? FingerDown seems a more likely candidate than Tap when mapping the mousePOver event. I would have expected things to be mapped in this way:

 MouseClick : FingerTap (i.e. finger down and then immediately up)
 MouseOver : FingerDown (finger down and stays on the spot)

If Apple had treated fingerDown as the counterpart to mouseOver, then the tooltip could be displayed upon FingerDown and made invisible again on fingerUp, which would be the counterpart to mouseOut.

Perhaps someone could enlighten me about the thinking process that led Apple to these particular mouse-to-touch event-mappings? Thanks