Using Sprites, do you?

I was curious if anyone here uses sprites? I think its smarter and faster. Having one large image loading rather than 20.

In example: http://www.me.com/my/core_idisk_1a/e...les_assets.png

I will for navigation and some other elements, but to me, loading every image onto one just seems too excessive to me. Is it faster to load? Yes, but I'd rather have slightly longer loading times (which is really microscopic) than figure out how far the image has to be shifted to show the right one. Also makes it easier if you have to make an edit in the future.

Originally Posted by Andrew R I will for navigation and some other elements, but to me, loading every image onto one just seems too excessive to me. Is it faster to load? Yes, but I'd rather have slightly longer loading times (which is really microscopic) than figure out how far the image has to be shifted to show the right one. Also makes it easier if you have to make an edit in the future.

Its also good for Apache or what ever web server you are running (i know it sounds silly, being like Monk), but having to make 20 calls back to the server, when only a few are needed. Then the css comes in and positions it. You get used to the background position formating, it's quite easy. If its 50 pixels down and 300 to the right, it's -300px -50px.

You can never have it into one image (unless your using a PNG which Mobile Me doesn't support IE 6, so thats fine), but certain things you can't have background images for, link lists, etc. because you can't mask what is shown or not.

I use them for hover elements... else, it's separate... Makes it easier if you want to change something to an icon... what would you do if you'd make them bigger, resize the lot?

+ you'd be loading in images a user might not even need.

+ you'd be loading in images a user might not even need.

You obviously don't group unrelated images together.

(which is really microscopic)

Not really - Gary was talking about how he downloading 10GB of files (thousands of files, not 1 big one) and it took 20 hours, 5 hours of which was just back->forward between the computer and the server, not actually doing anything. Even on 256kb broadband (for some reason, many people seem to think the entire world is on cable, which is absolutely WRONG) it ****s me when I see the status bar loading image after image after image, especially when it takes 1 second to load a 6kb image (and given 256kb downloads at 26kbs, the 20kb in that second that should have been downloading, but wasnt, as it was off waiting for the server to respond and set it the next image)

Given that, 25% is a big saving. Who cares about saving eleven characters (OMG you didn't need that extra <div> & </div>) if the site takes 25% longer to load simply because of the handshaking between clients and servers?

CSS sprites are great, however, I use them with caution in client sites. Like Gille said, something as simple as making an icon 10% bigger can turn into a big effort, and damn impossible if you don't know HTML+CSS. Unless you know that they don't want to make any changes in the near future, or its your own site (in which case, you should know your plans), I wouldn't use CSS sprites too much except for menus and other rollover effects.

The apple site is a good example. It's fine for them to group, as it'll be a developer updating it who knows how. If you notice you'll see tons of white space, I imagine that's for any slight changes that may come up (or they just were being lazy, though I think its for changes)

Take YouTube - they spend MILLIONS of dollars a year just on hosting. Even just 5% is a MASSIVE saving for them.