New Technology

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CSS sprites, followup

October 19, 2009 in New Technology, rant

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.

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CSS sprite idiocy

July 24, 2009 in New Technology, rant

This blog post has nothing to do with Popmundo or Popodeus in general, but this is just my quick rant on the current trend of CSS sprites.

They suck.

They’re too complicated to build, redesigning your site after you’ve used them is more difficult, changing one icon or graphic forces you to resend the entire sprite map, they use up more memory if there are blank spots in a huge grid. It’s a huge step backwards in technology, to times when machines were very limited and sprite buffers were an absolute necessity to get blazing fast sprite blitting into video memory. We are not in those times anymore!

Seriously, what’s wrong with HTTP 1.1 keep-alive? If we need to improve network transmission speeds, lets improve network technology and protocols. How about sending all images in a .jar (or .zip) file? Instantly send a bunch of related files. Jar files used to be quite popular way of sending multiple .class files (Java applets) to the browser, why isn’t there technology to send a whole site zipped up in a tight package instead of sending individual item separately compressed. Wouldn’t that be awesome!

I say no to sprites, they suck badly.

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Jetpacks for every internet citizen

May 28, 2009 in Jetpack, New Technology

Finally! We’re getting our jetpacks for the 21st century like we deserve.

https://labs.mozilla.com/2009/05/introducing-jetpack-call-for-participation/

There’s a short explanation of what it is and a demonstration video.

This seems a lot like Greasemonkey, but with several interesting integration points, with embedded jQuery and a cross-domain XMLHttpRequest object by default and tighter integration with the browser user interface.

Will this outgrow the popularity and usefulness of Greasemonkey, Chromemetal, Opera userscripts etc. that is hard to predict. And how easily is a Jetpack script ported to other browsers? At least the Greasemonkey add-on has been quite stale lately with not much visible progress and has caused at least one eager developer to create a fork of Greasemonkey, namely Webmonkey. Which solution will be the most advanced and useful one in the end, Webmonkey or Jetpack, its hard to predict.

I hope that competition will bring good features to all of our browsers, but  in this case having more than one platform for distributing scripts seems a bit confusing.

Since it’s very alpha right now, I don’t except any normal user to actually install it yet. Also there are probably lots of bugs, memory leaks, security holes and other kinds of problems in the early stages, so I would recommend anyone who prefers to feel safe not to install it just yet, before the add-on becomes mature.

Certainly an interesting add-on product worth keeping your eyes peeled for.

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