No, we are not promoting a new soft drink. Yes, we are proud that Niels Matthijs, one of our in-house front-enders, has published another riveting article in Smashing Magazine. Niels revisits the use of CSS sprites and gives tips and tricks that are especially useful when coding a new website from scratch. Learn all about how you can make image targeting in CSS sprites easier in his article: http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2012/04/11/css-sprites-revisited/.
CSS sprites increase the page loading speed by combining all your background graphics into a single image. By using the position properties you can then display the image segment of your choice. Many web developers have been using these ‘image repositories’ for years and know that they can make pages load a lot quicker. That is nothing new.
What is new, however, is that Niels has optimized the layout of his CSS sprite sheets and uses a Photoshop® script (credits to Filip Van Tendeloo) that automatically creates a grid of guides based on the size of the sprites square. By adding numbers to the x and y axes of the grid, it becomes a lot easier to pinpoint every square in the grid, and to calculate the coordinates of each image. And with the help of a LESS functions, you can then avoid doing intricate calculations or finding random start coordinates.
Read Niels’ article for all details: http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2012/04/11/css-sprites-revisited/.
