Re: CSS: Extended tiling. Proposal

Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:
> Some thoughts about existing CSS3 proposal:
> 
> To render box with borders and background will take 10 images to download.
> This feature will be quite popular,
> but each http: connection takes near 40 kbytes of machine instructions just
> to establish and serve connection (without transfer). To be short it is
> better to reduce pollution.
> 
> Artistic borders being designed will be used in 99% with artistic (image)
> backgrounds. I think it is better to keep such borders and background design
> in one image.

You make a good point in that the extra HTTP connections indeed add a 
lot of overhead. Then again HTTP 1.1 allows for reusing a single 
connection for multiple images. Not sure how it plays out here though.

One problem with your approach is that it mixes border and background 
semantics. In a sense you are implementing borders with backgrounds.

I do second your opinion that the current proposal would result in lots 
of connections, but images can usually be cached rather well. But the 
current proposal does make things rather explicit, which (to my 
experience) is a good thing when dealing with style sheets.


> Other possible way how to implement this is to use separate image definition
> file beside the image itself.
> Instead of adding attributes into CSS element to use just background-image:
> url(image.png/image.def).

I don't think this would be a good idea. Adding yet another dimension to 
  the authoring process would make things overly complicated. Adding 
support for packaging multiple images in a single file like Java does 
with .jar (read: zip compression) files could be an option which would 
keep things in one file, but would it be worth it?

-- 
Max Romantschuk
http://max.nma.fi/

Received on Wednesday, 5 May 2004 03:11:35 UTC