A method and system for associating active regions with positions within displayed images in a device and display independent manner. Active regions are described by client-side image maps include in hyper-text markup language descriptions of web pages that include specifications of images to be displayed within the web pages. The specifications of images and descriptions of client-side image maps are replaced by servers with a parameterized call to an image viewer, invoked by a browser on a client computer to display the image. The browser maintains an internal description of the positions of active regions in image-relative coordinates, thereby providing dynamic viewing of web pages that include images with associated active regions while maintaining the originally-defined correspondence between the active regions and images.