Sprites
June 22nd, 2009
Steve Souders: CSS Sprites are a way to make your web pages faster. A sprite combines multiple background images into a single image. This reduces the number of downloads in the page. Most major websites use sprites, but they’re a pain in the neck!
Sprites have the advantage of working right now, but maybe there should be a way to serve up a multipart response with your sprite images as well. That would cut down on CSS rule count and maintenance, but still group the images in one HTTP request. Authors are already giving up the advantages of separate resources in return for speed, so maybe this is worth doing.
You can (in theory… haha) get some of these advantages with HTTP pipelining, but a multipart response would allow the server optimize the response order as they do with sprites today.
Update: more from vlad
June 22nd, 2009 at 1:10 pm
[...] Rob Sayre – Sprites [...]
June 22nd, 2009 at 9:02 pm
[...] Sayre, also of Mozilla, broached the subject: Sprites have the advantage of working right now, but maybe there should be a way to serve up a [...]
June 23rd, 2009 at 2:09 am
Introducing dedicated sprite syntax in CSS might be simpler for authors, I think. (And is being considered.)
June 23rd, 2009 at 8:17 am
How about data: URLs?