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"The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it."
Terry Pratchet, Diggers
The new Frogponds website (www.frogponds.com.au ) is now live.
Its a small site designed by my 2 padawans, uses our custom CMS, the PageSpeed Insights score is decent, and .. I created my first CSS image sprite in ages.
Over the course of my 15 years (professionally) implementing websites, they slowly needed to be more "user content driven" - user has control over almost all images used on their site through the admin system. So while you can easily create sprites for UI elements - creating one to cater for user uploaded content is almost impossible, since it will require the user to have the know-how.
And yes, while sprites are still used - like for icon libraries, etc - you don't create them. You just use them. Furthermore, most modern designs these days do not have that much of a "complicated" or "graphically heavy" type of design.
Likewise, the new Frogponds website.
But this one section on the homepage, the staff images at the bottom - those bubbles. Yes they're small and its only 4 of them. But I figured I might as well create an image sprite for it since I can reduce 4 HTTP requests to just 1.
So yeah. CSS image sprites. I've missed creating you. but I also don't miss you. Will I be creating more sprites for future websites? Not sure, to be honest, because again, its down to the design, and really, how much effort you have allocated time for to make a website speed much quicker.