How do you approach the use of image sprites in css?
Should I take all the images in my website and combine them to one image sprite? Is it really that beneficial?
How hard is it to maintain those images and change them later on?
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How do you approach the use of image sprites in css?
Should I take all the images in my website and combine them to one image sprite? Is it really that beneficial?
How hard is it to maintain those images and change them later on?
Of course not. You’re taking it too literal.
I find sprites are best used for groups of similar images. Examples include:
If you have a lot of them on a busy site, very. It saves a request for each image, saving the user time and your server a whole bunch of concurrent connections.
If you’ve used them logically, pretty simple. If you need to add another navigation item, you open up your nav sprite and expand it. For things like navigation it can actually be easier to maintain because you have like comparisons right next to you in the same document.
Edit, having seen one of the more extreme examples, I’ll add that I would never go that far because:
It’s 60k to download. Not huge but on slow connections, that’s 60k that has to be downloaded before anything shows. If all your visual assets are tied up, it can make the load time seem longer.
Your CSS becomes a nonsensical mish-mash of
background-positioncommands. If you do want to make changes you have to go back to the sprite and measure everything. Again and again and again.God have mercy on your soul if you need to enlarge something in the top-left of the sprite. You’d probably just add a new sprite below the current ones.
And that might lead to bloat. Indeed, just loading all these images might be loading a whole lot of material that some users will never actually see. Loading unused data is probably worse than a connection overhead (considering how easily static content can be served by multiple cheap servers or a CDN)
The other examples are a lot more simple and worthwhile (IMO).