[Laszlo-dev] [BULK] Re: image sprites to improve app load time in DHTML

[P T Withington]

I think this is a great idea.  Max and Henry have recently been  
working in this area, so may tell me otherwise, but  I think this  
could all be hidden under the sprite API and would make DHTML more  
like SWF, where you could talk about the 'frames' of a resource -- in  
SWF they would really be frames, and in DHTML they would just be  
translated/clipped regions of an image.

On 2008-03-05, at 12:20 EST, Lorien Henry-Wilkins wrote:

> Image sprites are when you lay out all of your images on one single  
> image file, and use CSS positioning to display the chunk you are  
> after in your specific html <img> tag. This cuts down on the number  
> of http connections you have open to your host, which should  
> significantly reduce load time for pages with a large number of  
> images (like most openlaszlo apps). You can read more about this  
> here: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/css-sprites/
>
> It would be cool if we included a feature in the platform for  
> automatic image spriting when compiling to DHTML. The platform would  
> take all of your images and compose them into one Uber image, and  
> then change all of your references to individual images to point to  
> the new image file, and apply the necessary CSS to do positioning. I  
> don't know if it's possible to do all of that with image scripting,  
> but it would be cool if the developer didn't have to do it manually.
>
> It wouldn't work for background images that are repeated in the X or  
> Y directions, but it should work for other images - even ones that  
> are dynamically resized.
>
> Let me know what you think.
>
> Lorien
>