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.

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.