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
