RE: background-position-x & y

Is the description of sprites the only or main use-case for this feature ?

-----Original Message-----
From: www-style-request@w3.org [mailto:www-style-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Aryeh Gregor
Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2008 7:39 AM
To: Jethro Larson
Cc: www-style@w3.org
Subject: Re: background-position-x & y


On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 3:23 AM, Jethro Larson <jethrolarson@gmail.com> wrote:
> I feel that one of the big goals for CSS3 would be to ease the use of
> sprites as they can improve performance of pages by a lot. Being able to
> load up all the UI images into a single file would decrease download time
> significantly and re-skinning a site would be as simple as changing a single
> reference and modifying a single image file.

Sprites are a terrible hack.  CSS shouldn't make any attempt to
support them.  CSS sprites should be obviated, for preference, by
browsers loading all images simultaneously, negating the performance
advantage of sprites.  (Possibly only if the server requests this
somehow, if causing server load is an issue.)  There is no possible
justification for trying to support an interface where authors are
supposed to manually concatenate images and manually specify offsets
in CSS rather than treating the images as the logically separate units
they actually are.  CSS sprites might be useful now, but that's a bad
situation, not one that anyone should be trying to perpetuate.

Received on Thursday, 13 November 2008 01:43:32 UTC