Comment by mattmanser
7 hours ago
Who remembers sprite sheets? Does that give my age away?
I did an optimization pass for a client once where I got rid of a ton of the sprites but didn't have the energy to redo it all, so it just had huge sections that were blank.
Super snappy loading afterwards though.
I indeed remember.
HTTP 2+ (supported by every web browser) obviates sprite sheets.
They were a useful hack, but still a hack.
Yes, good times! With http2/3 they don't really matter anymore though, you get similar benefits from request pipelining.
Spriting is actually harmful for performance except in specific HTTP-1 scenarios.