While writing my first CSS Sprite article, I created a simple, in no way efficient, sprite generator. Last week I needed to show some numbers to the project manager to convince him the sprite technique is worth using, so I modified a bit the program to arrange the icons in different layouts and show the size savings.
Want to know with which layout I improved the file size by 78.6%?
It's easy to get lost in the Internet while looking for information. It's one of its greatest points: There are thousands of millions of websites out there. Information is the key purpose of the net and nobody can deny it.
But, as in many other cases, quantity does not equal quality. Poor designed websites, too bloated, with many inlined styles or little semantics (if none), are begging for trouble: Their information have lost accessibility.
Maybe it's my fault, maybe not. The truth is that I had some problems optimizing my webserver load with CSS Sprites, a nice, clean technique to max the efficiency of every image. Let's go into details:
I used a set of flag icons (taken from Fam fam fam) in a site admin zone. There are 247 flags, sweet and small (16x11) and that's all I needed. In this admin you can browse through tables with tons of data, to the point that all of the flags may be shown at once. More than once, in fact. So in a clean-cached browser you probably end requesting 247 images from the server. Even if the only answer were a 304 Not modified (in another scenario) they're too many requests. No way, being the "optimizer" I am, I need to change that.
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