the future of css sprites

Hi all,

I've been ignoring css sprites for some time now because they simply don't work well in em designs. I've been looking into future developments of css and while I did find some improvements there weren't any real breakthroughs concerning css sprites.

Which is a shame, because all that is needed is a background crop function, to crop a certain parts from you sprite. Only the cropped part should be shown, and could then be positioned as wanted. I made up a little syntax myself to demonstrate what it should be able to do, but be reminded that it was thought up in less than a minute and is not really a syntax proposal:

a {background-crop:0px 0px 8px 8px}
a:hover {background-crop-origin:8px 8px;}

The first two values represent the origin point (upper left corner of the area to crop), the last two values represent the length across the x and y axis. For more info, I've written a little blog post about my issues with css sprites

http://www.onderhond.com/blog/work/the-future-of-css-sprites


My question is this: did I miss anything, is there already some way of doing what I want to do and if not, do you think it is a good idea to implement such a feature?

Greets,
Niels Matthijs

Received on Friday, 6 March 2009 12:34:57 UTC