CSS sprites, followup

September 19, 2009 in New Technology, rant | 1 comment

I ranted in a previous blog entry about CSS sprites.

There finally seems to be a good open source tool for automating the conversion of your site so it uses these stupid CSS sprites: http://spriteme.org/

Looking at the savings page, on average there’s actually no savings at all when it comes to sending less data, isn’t that a bit silly?
I don’t much believe in saving HTTP requests on smaller sites, but it could of course be a huge difference for sites like Yahoo or Ebay. Who knows. Maybe one day I’ll find more info about that. Until then, I’ll use separate image files as before.

  1. Alanas Anikonis’s avatar

    Alanas Anikonis on July 4, 2010 at 21:43

    And reading back on these posts now, I still think sprites are not a way to handle a solution of bandwidth and improved network traffic. It’s an ugly hack and patch, and Google etc. are working on ways to create more efficient protocols on top of TCP for faster transmission of files.

    Firefox doesn’t use HTTP 1.1 pipelining by default yet (unless they switched over already), but they’re going to ship it on by default soon in the future.

    I rather tackle some other problems than fiddle with CSS sprite maps. I don’t want a pixel perfect web, and CSS sprites don’t fit in a fully scalable web. Use SVG graphics instead.

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