Everybody was using imagemaps in the 90s because it was the only way to have multiple links over an image, something we wanted to do because without CSS we could not have a row or a column of buttons with fancy colors and fonts and placed where we wanted them to be. So nav bars were a large image with imagemap anchors placed over the buttons. Then we got CSS, tables (used for layout!), divs with positioning and eventually the features that web developers are using today.