CSS Sprites vs Sprites

Sprites when implemented are cool. That's not the problem.

But modules that try to automate creating them by knitting together images via server-side configs and scripts and image libraries (vs making a PNG in an image prog - which is the core skill of people that want to USE sprites) is certainly clunky - unless it ends up with the cool-UI-from-hell.

Good luck to them, but it's more a programming exercise than a solution.
(unless, as I say, it turns out cooler than fireworks)

In theory its fantastic yes, but like i mentioned there is a lot of thought that does/should go into creating sprites manually, which cannot always be reproduced programmatically. Personally I think this should almost be left as a design choice because there are pros and cons to deciding what is and what is not going to be part of a sprite collection, secondly there are many cases where the display of the sprite is done in such a matter that it requires specific white space at very specific points in order to not display bits of other sprites, which again is nothing we can extrapolate via PHP.

Image libraries also seem to have a rough time compressing these, I can double the quality, and decrease the filesize in half simply using Photoshop, and to be honest CSS Sprites are something that everyone should understand, they are really not hard to create, its just another skill.

Tj Holowaychuk

Vision Media - Victoria BC Web Design
Victoria British Columbia Web Design School