Archive for August 8th, 2010

Using spriteme can improve your website view performance (Spriteme and sprites a quick look)

Sunday, August 8th, 2010

SpriteMe icon, improve website access times with spriteme

I’ve recently come across around SpriteMe a project which explains an approach in web development towards picture showing speed up with CSS.
The whole idea behind spriteme that it allows you to have a large image with a number of images and you can use some javascript to display the necessary image element part of the complete many elements image.

Using this kind of approach in displaying images in a website can save you the many dubious requests to the webserver and therefore could improve the website general access time.
The whole concept is very intesting so I suggest check it out by yourself.

Starting with sprime is a piece of cake as the guys of sprime.org has prepared a special javascript bookmark button which through which the user is able to prepare some image sprites.

A very good profound article on what is the Sprites and therein implementation called CSS Sprites: What They Are, Why They’re Cool, and How To Use Them can be red here
Another good place to visit if you want to further read about Sprime and Sprites is the Css Sprites website

The whole concept behind sprime is based on an oldschool computer graphics technology called SpriteMe Read further about sprite technology more in wikipedia
The css sprites are also well documented in w3cschools.com website so take a quick look therein as well.

As I’m a into computing for quite some time I even remeber that there was times that this kind of technology was a complete hype, even if I’m my memory is correct the great Heroes of Might and Magic II ‘s game graphic system was based around the sprite technology.

BTW Heroes of Might and Magic II is in the head in my best strategy game list.
Sprites was also heavily used earlier in games industry especially in console games for it’s numerous privileges.
I haven’t yet myself implemented the spritesme CSS technology in my website but I’m considering doing so ASAP I have some few hours time.
Not everything is perfect with spritesme though it can have a major impact on a website performance whenever implemented, there are still many risks as many browsers doesn’t render the CSS in a proper way, not to mention that there are many people who use text mode browsers as lynx/links or some browser extensions that would not play well with CSS.
In the meantime I’ll be glad to get some feedback of users who has experience with spritesme in web dev.