Your blog went the way of LinuxHater’s. Dried up with nothing left to say that hasn’t been said already.

My god, you have infinite patience.

His idea is to have all images loaded from the CSS so that if stylesheets don’t load, the page loads more quickly. Totally ignoring the fact that all browsers, especially mobile ones, have a “don’t load images” option right next to their “don’t load CSS” option.

it’s a technique which involves having all of (if not just many of) your image resources in a single fine and using clipping in CSS to display them. It’s supposed to speed up page loads (and technically save some marginal amount of bandwidth) by cutting down the number of requests, since because all of the images are embedded within a single file, only one request is made (plus the html page and stylesheet) as opposed to n requests, one for each image resource.

It’s stupidly convoluted, and requires a lot of extra work as well as drastically changing your approach to page design; all of your graphical resources are to be placed as DIVs with background attributes, and the css involved stands to drastically increase development time, especially on more complex, more graphics intensive layouts, and there are the aformentioned usability problems which arise. And the matter than stuff like logos, chars and pictorial images don’t belong in CSS to begin with, and as such should not be sprited.

Layout and stylistic elements belong in CSS, those are what you sprite up.

If he’s talking about spriting, he’s right. Spriting was conceived as a means to speed up page loads (but not necessarily to conserve bandwidth, a few dozen small images can easily take up less space and thus use up less bandwidth individually than they would if they were combined into a single large image) Though to suggest that CSS itself was conceived expressly for the sake of spriting is completely stupid, not to mention that he’s shot himself into the foot so many times already, it doesn’t matter.

Only text is considered content? What is this, the ’90s?

Way to go Oiaohm, you’ve invented the more inefficient and pointlessly difficult way of displaying images that no accessibility system can understand.

If you don’t have those images in your actual HTML markup, then accessibility goes out the window. You don’t seem to grasp the concept of accessibility and using the correct markup for the correct situation. YOU NEED PROPER MARKUP! CSS IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR IMAGE TAGS!

Thomas, there were these things developed long before PHP called Server Side Includes (SSI) that did the same thing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes

That’s sort of why we use frameworks and MVC and stuff — a basic example of which is your PHP includes. Your “point” about the lack of DRY in “regular HTML” is a little silly: HTML is just a mark-up language, after all. It’s like complaining that I’ve been forced to re-use the letter ‘a’ all over the place in this post.

Anyway, if you’re interested in pursuing the topic, I’d recommend Terrence Parr’s thoughts at http://www.cs.usfca.edu/~parrt/papers/mvc.templates.pdf.