CSS sprites to improve network performance

[wecs]

Like google does http://foremostmedia.blogspot.com/2010/ ... -neat.html
Sprites http://www.alistapart.com/articles/sprites


It can be a good idea to reduce requests to servers, make the load faster, save bandwidth...


For custom skins(or custom imageset), online css sprite generators can help and make easier the adaptation to this change
http://css-sprit.es/
http://spritegen.website-performance.org/

All what they need is only a master image, the css stylesheet do the rest.

[Oleg]

Yes please.

[igorw]

Yes, but it needs to be painless. There must be a script to generate appropriate images and css for production environments. And it needs to be possible to turn it off with a flip of a switch and fall back to plain images. On-the-fly (re-)compilation may be an option too, I guess.

[naderman]

Not in RFC format, so moved to discussion. Not sure why this is a 4.0 thing. I definately agree, but this shouldn't be too hard to accomplish in 3.x?

[Tienchen]

CSS sprites is good - and it isn't hard at all.
The only concern is about customizing. E.g. CKEditor has CSS-sprites, but they are from major version to another incompatible, and it is quite hard to make your own (well, if you are a good designer probably not, but we all now not only good webdesigner want to customize the look...)
So at least there must be source-files available when there are any changes (e.g. .psd / .ai or similar).

[imkingdavid]

Isn't this concept sort of already implemented in the way the New Post button is shown (on hover, it simply moves to another part of the image instead of using a new image)?

I think it's a good idea since it saves bandwidth, and it shouldn't be too difficult to accomplish.

[bantu]

Yes, but it needs to be painless. There must be a script to generate appropriate images and css for production environments. And it needs to be possible to turn it off with a flip of a switch and fall back to plain images. On-the-fly (re-)compilation may be an option too, I guess.

I second that.

[jaybed]

CSS Sprites is pretty much the exact same theory. This is just what I need to squeeze out a bit more performance.

[joey77]

Please don't do that, be patient and wait for ressources packages to be implemented
http://limi.net/articles/resource-packages/

[TerryE]

Yes, sprites can save bandwidth, but surely the main issue here is the fact that viewing a phpBB page simply generates too many unnecessary requests -- a typical viewtopic can generate over 40. It's not so much the bandwidth, but the general responsiveness. I've had to crank up my Apache prefork config to stop the ridiculous child process churn that this generates. I've given some background analysis on my observations on this article.

Grouping images into sprites by category makes tremendous sense. We could end up waiting for ever for resource packages.