CSS Sprites vs Sprites

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Modules Last release Usage Maintainer(s) Documentation Module Updated Info as of
CSS Sprite Generator 5.x-1.x-dev 2 2010-Jul-23
Data URI Sprites Generator 0 Dmitriy.trt 2010-Jul-23
Imageset 5.x-1.6, 6.x-1.6 29 pvb-d@drupal.ru Handbook 2009-Dec-06 2010-Jul-23
Sprite 6.x-1.x-dev 6 aaron 2010-Jul-23
Sprite Sheets 0 tom friedhof
2010-Jul-23

Comments

Shame

and wim discussed it...

'sprites' was supposed to be

tjholowaychuk's picture

'sprites' was supposed to be further developed by one of the Workhabit guys, I have not heard back from him and there have been no commits so
I cannot really say what is going on there. I can almost guarantee that these modules will tank though, it is NOT hard to create sprites manually, they will be precise, correct, simple to implement, and logical in terms of grouping. Creating sprites dynamically in this manor is kind of a waste I was considering removing the project until he contacted me.


Tj Holowaychuk

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

Hm.

niklp's picture

Can you elaborate on how it's "wasteful"?? I would have thought that 30-40 http requests per page for insignificant images was more wasteful, myself? This module is awesome in theory - are the practicalities so different?

Web Development in Nottingham, UK by Kineta Systems

Sprites when implemented are

dman's picture

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,

tjholowaychuk's picture

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

I can't imagine how an

s.daniel's picture

I can't imagine how an automated solution should decide wich image type or compression rate should be chosen for a particular image. This must go wrong in most scenarios, the only area where I could see automated sprited generation is where you can focus on a particular area of images where you know what to expect like imageset does with taxonomy_image. A sprites module that integrates with views/imagecache to load only one picture when showing a list of user pictures for example would be interesting.

Auto CSS Sprites

sunnybear's picture

Daniel, this issue can be resolved in most of cases. If you just look at CSS files -- almost all of them have concrete groups of background images, that can be easily combined into CSS Sprites. We have released recentrly Auto CSS Sprites generator:
http://sprites.webo.in/
We are looking to improve it's algorythm but I haven't seen yet any solution that will be better.

Your site didn't work for

s.daniel's picture

Your site didn't work for me, either I got no result or the downloaded file a zero byte file called websitename.webo.de. Maybe an issue with 7zip?

please

sunnybear's picture

Daniel, please provide CSS file URL -- I will investigate this issue.

.tar.gz are simple linux archives. Maybe there are some problems with them, but I tried to use 7z -- it opens one archive (.gz), shows the second zero size archive -- and opens it normally (because it's tar-archive).

wino-biolandbau.de

sunnybear's picture

if it's your website (I've checked Apache logs) -- I've entered CSS file URL and get this file
sprites . webo . in/tmp/wino.tar.gz
(remove spaces around dots). I've encountered bug with hyphen in website URL -- I'm working to fix archives creation...

greggles's picture

another sprite tool joins the fray, with releases for 5 and 6

http://drupal.org/project/imageset

More Sprite Work

mikeytown2's picture

Related code
http://drupal.org/sandbox/dman/1434878 - Imagefield magazinelayout

Nutty Idea
http://groups.drupal.org/node/127079

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