IF i want to load any image quickly should i use as a css background not in ? I think difference only will show in low speed internet connection.
I saw many articles related to css only preloading they all are using images in css background.
http://perishablepress.com/press/2008/04/15/pure-css-better-image-preloading-without-javascript/
http://perishablepress.com/press/2007/07/22/css-throwdown-preload-images-without-javascript/
http://divitodesign.com/css/create-an-image-pre-loader-with-css-only/
It's all about the order in which things happen. Browsers are at liberty to begin processing things as soon as possible, so, in the average page with the css defined in the head, it is able to start requesting and recieving images from the css before it would be able to do so from the body of the document.
So in short, the answer is yes.
But... bear in mind that it doesn't actually load the images any faster. All you are doing is changing the load order, not the absolute speed. The images will still take the same amount of time to load. If you move everything out of the body and into css in the head, you are still left with priority decisions as to which ones to load first. So you come full circle. You can't make everything faser than everything else.
This is clearly browser-specific. Besides, there is no logical reason it should be the case, and wouldn't quite make a difference even on low-speed connections. Even if there was a 200 ms delay between the starting load time of an image on a page and of an image in a CSS rule, the end user would never notice it.
If you have to do a web page for low-speed connections, the solution isn't really to "optimize" that way.
Related
Is there a way, without javascript, to load a small image for a background before the real image is downloaded? Without javascript because I know how to do it with it.
I can't test if the following CSS3 would work because it works too quick:
body {
background-image:url('hugefile.jpg'), url('tinypreload.jpg');
}
If the tinypreload.jpg is only, say 20k, and the hugefile.jpg is 300k -- would this accomplish the task? I assume that both downloads would start at the same time instead of being consecutive.
Update
Timing the results using Firefox's profiling revealed that it's not practical / not worth it to load a smaller background first. Main reason is the connection time. For tiny pictures it's the same time to connect as it is to download the content. For images where this becomes worth it -- the file size is not recommended for mobile.
If you still want to achieve this effect - combine all your "necessary" images into 1 file and display them as cropped background with correct offset. Load your high-res images through javascript, and update the content afterward.
You could exploit css load order and overrides to achieve this result.
Try loading the small image from your main css file and then put a <style></style> tag at the bottom of the html page. The inline style will override the main style but will load last because of it's position in the code.
The difference would be milliseconds though, so it may be too quick. It's also hacky and would result in invalid, but working code. Worth a shot though.
If you're trying to fix a mobile problem then have a look at this article on context specific images as that might be a more effective way to go.
This article on CSS3 multiple backgrounds may also help, as you may be able to exploit the stacking order to achieve the result you're after
It would be useful to know what problem you are trying to solve beyond load order, as it's hard to give advice on this one.
As I said in my comment you can use the 'net' tab in firebug for firefox (called timeline in chrome) to see the actual load order on your page - you can even filter it (on firefox) for CSS only or images only - this will enable you to test.
The typical rule of thumb when it comes to using CSS sprites for images is that you should only do it for smaller images (like icons) and that actual image content should always be represented through <img> elements. My question is: why? Aren't the advantages of spriting worthwhile for content images as well?
One reason I have read is to enable the use of alt text, to be more syntactically correct and accessible to screen-readers. However, when that is a concern, couldn't you just as easily use a single tiny transparent image with all the syntactical sugar atop a sprite that presents the real visual content?
You could, but:
Content images don’t tend to be re-used as much as UI-type images like icons. Imagine a newspaper site: if every content image they used in every story was part of a sprite, that sprite would very quickly get huge, and would be downloaded even by users who only looked at one story.
Website content is generally expected to be maintained by people who don’t know CSS. It’s a bit unreasonable to expect content editors to edit a master sprite image file, re-save out to a JPG, and pop in some CSS just to put an image on a page.
If you sprite a lot of large image files, the sprite file will get really large. It might take an unacceptably long time to download when the user first visits the page, or it might use up too much bandwidth on users who only end up seeing one of the images within the sprite.
Obviously, those are generalisations — in a specific situation, it might make perfect sense to sprite larger/more content-y images.
On using an <img> tag with a tiny transparent image file for sprites, you can do that for any sprite images — it’s often useful for clipping and positioning the sprite image beyond what background-position allows.
One additional reason I can think of, is search-engines; if you have an image with a descriptive alt-tag or a figure element with a figcaption, search engines will be able to find, classify and show it.
Sprites are usually usefull for static contents (images that are common on many pages).
Content pictures often appears in only one page, so you can't add it to your sprite file.
If you want to have real-time sprite generation, making custom sprite file with all your pictures, I think the generation cost is far more expensive than the duplicated HTTP calls it saves.
Sprites are here to save HTTP requests, but you should not waste server-side computation time to make it, nor put expensive and unusefull pictures in your sprite file.
Sprites should be used for common icons across the whole website and not for page specific content. When you use sprites for big images you get a lot of white space that is wasted.
According to http://blog.vlad1.com/2009/06/22/to-sprite-or-not-to-sprite/ this is also a problem:
Another (but much less important) downside is that if a sprite-using
page is zoomed using the full-page zoom feature that’s present in many
browsers, the browser may need to do extra work to get the correct
behaviour at the edges of these images — basically, to avoid adjacent
images in the sprite from “leaking in.” This isn’t a problem for
small images, but can be a performance hit for bigger ones.
From the research I've continued to do on this, another potential issue is memory consumption. Despite the fact that sprites may be compressed enough to download quickly, the footprint they fill in the client machine's memory is after the browser has rendered them, meaning it can be quite large, even for sprites with fairly small file sizes.
I haven't seen a definitive answer on whether or not this memory footprint is any larger than what one would see when loading the same number of images without sprites. I will be testing that in the coming weeks for the project that prompted this question, so I will return and update this answer once I have a conclusion.
Sprites are used to reduce the amount of requests to a server. The impact of lots of small requests is slowing the server more than one bigger request. But if the image of sprites, I like to call it sprite-map, is too large, it will also slow down the performance. The other thing of importance is like you sad the possibility for each single picture to give some name, to manage and to index by search engine.
I have a colourful background image that is 2000px x 1500px and because of the details I am saving it as a jpeg that renders at 1.1 MB. I am using the CSS background property to render the image. So being relatively new to web dev and working with a client/designer that's not open to a change of design at this point in the process, what should I do to help this image load blazingly fast. I don't know if it makes a difference but the site is using Joomla 1.5.9. This is something I've always wanted to understand but have had trouble uncovering solutions for... I hope someone can help!!
Thanks everyone!
There's no way to make images magically load faster. Sometimes, though, splitting an image in smaller images allows for surprising size gains; so if it's not out of question for your CSS layout (it typically is, though), you could try this.
Another possibility for you would be to use progressive JPEG images. They are encoded in such a way that enables browsers to display a progressively more precise image as it loads. This means that at first, the image appears blurry (or incomplete) but with full-dimensions, then it progressively gets sharper and better. It's well-suited for images meant to load slowly (or at least, images acknowledged to load slowly).
The best thing that you can do is try to shrink the file size to as small as possible. Let this be using some type of optimizer, smush.it for example. If you created the background image try saving it as progressive first, it loads a lower res version first then finishes loading. But the best thing is to try to shrink the size of the image width and height by finding a repeating pattern and cropping just that portion out and using it. Most about.me images are no larger than 100kb in size that are above 1200px wide.
you could immediatley call the image in the head by using
<script>
(new Image()).src = "IMAGE PATH";
</script>
and make sure you compress the image as much as you can with different programs, or if you have photoshop cs5 you can save it for a web device to strip out all of the extra junk, you can try yahoo's smush.it
http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/
or you could delay the loading of the site entirely for a few seconds, until you can be sure that the image is loading, you could try something like hiding all of the elements and fading them in upon a setTimeout something like
*CSS
body{
opacity:0;
}
*jQuery
setTimeout(function(){$('body').animate({opacity:'1'},300)},5000);
although that may not be all that practical.
Would loading the background image after the rest of the page has loaded work for you? At least this way visitors will be able to use the rest of your site until the 1.1MB has loaded.
Something along the lines of setting the style attribute of the <body> to be background: url(image.jpg) within an onload function?
Delivering the image over a CDN will likely speed things up; the better ones are usually optimized to deliver the proper TCP packet size/MTU to the wide variety of clients out there and have generally done a lot of work in the details of delivering things quickly. Slow connections like cellphones will still hate you for it, but getting things like packet size right can make the most of the bandwidth that is available.
In what scenarios CSS sprites would be good to use and when not? Is it time saver or only server request saver?
I think bandwidth use will be same because image is same like ong big image but it's in a parts?
When and where use of css sprite is a time saving(in work) option ?
For navigation it's good for rollover pre-loading effect but not good for images disabled people?
What are other good usage which can save our time once and in future (if changes comes in design) both?
Edit: Sprites is only for css background so should we use images in background as much as possible to save sever request, is it good idea?
Update:
To implement takes more time then regular method and mostly client do not much worry about some slowness like http request. My question is can we save time in site making process and future maintenance of website using css sprite. or regular method is enough.
In nutshell my question is: “can CSS sprites save our designer and xhtml css coder time (I'm not talking about server request)?”
It reduces the number of HTTP requests which will enhance site performance.
CSS Sprites are the preferred method
for reducing the number of image
requests. Combine your background
images into a single image and use the
CSS background-image and
background-position properties to
display the desired image segment.
In Minimize HTTP Requests
CSS sprites are a time saver because it is a server request saver, as server requests are notably time-consuming. Using CSS sprites usually decreases your webpages' load/render time dramatically. There are times when they cannot be used, such as with background images repeating in two dimensions, but when you can use them, it's almost always worth the effort.
Of course you shouldn't sprite groups of images that are very big, especially if they're not very likely to be shown. Don't sprite an entire photo gallery into one big image, for instance =)
Other measures which amount to pretty much the same thing would be minifying, compressing and combining your scripts and styles into only one js file and one css file.
EDIT
With regards to your clarification, i'd say no, CSS sprites will always mean more work, never less, compared to just using the separate images as they are. I still wholeheartedly endorse their use, tho =)
CSS sprites are best used for elements that have a fixed width and height. Otherwise, you need large empty spaces in your sprite image, which can (depending on file type) increase the size a bit.
Due to the way different file formats compress images, sometimes a CSS sprite image will have a noticeably smaller file size than the total file size of separate images. That’s a nice bonus.
As mentioned, sprites reduce the HTTP request overhead, which can help load time. I’ve never seen any numbers on the magnitude of this effect.
Sprites will add a bit of time for your CSS developers. It shouldn’t affect your designers. But bear in mind that your developers code the site up once; the benefits of sprites apply every time someone looks at the site.
It will only reduce the number of requests but that will benefit both the server and the client. The server will not need to handle as many requests. The client, because it is limited in the number of parallel requests that it can make, will render faster as many of it's previous "requests" for the image will be served from its cache, allowing it to make the requests that it does need more expediently.
Using sprites reduces the number of requests and thus also the network overhead. Loading a few sprite image is faster and uses less bandwidth even if the image data is the same (or even a bit more) than the individual images.
It needs a bit more work and some planning to combine the individual images into sprite collection images, so the development time is somewhat longer. The difference is less if you have it in the plan to start with rather than combining the separate images afterwards.
Any scenario where you have several same size background images that replace each other (or complement each other) is ideal for sprites.
As long as you have something like a dynamic photoshop PSD file in the back, then the designer's maintenance won't be an issue. But if it is a static file like PNG/GIF, then maintenance will take more time as you cannot control the individual images separately anymore.
Overall, sprites is a great idea. Use it for fixed width & height images that are less likely to be updated frequently.
Sprites are always good to use. They help speed up the loading of web pages and prevent the blinking effect on navigation hovering.
How do you approach the use of image sprites in css?
Should I take all the images in my website and combine them to one image sprite? Is it really that beneficial?
How hard is it to maintain those images and change them later on?
Should I take all the images in my website and combine them to one image sprite?
Of course not. You're taking it too literal.
I find sprites are best used for groups of similar images. Examples include:
All states of a graphical button
States of icons
All permutations of a background (unless it needs to tile two ways)
Is it really that beneficial?
If you have a lot of them on a busy site, very. It saves a request for each image, saving the user time and your server a whole bunch of concurrent connections.
How hard is it to maintain those images and change them later on?
If you've used them logically, pretty simple. If you need to add another navigation item, you open up your nav sprite and expand it. For things like navigation it can actually be easier to maintain because you have like comparisons right next to you in the same document.
Edit, having seen one of the more extreme examples, I'll add that I would never go that far because:
It's 60k to download. Not huge but on slow connections, that's 60k that has to be downloaded before anything shows. If all your visual assets are tied up, it can make the load time seem longer.
Your CSS becomes a nonsensical mish-mash of background-position commands. If you do want to make changes you have to go back to the sprite and measure everything. Again and again and again.
God have mercy on your soul if you need to enlarge something in the top-left of the sprite. You'd probably just add a new sprite below the current ones.
And that might lead to bloat. Indeed, just loading all these images might be loading a whole lot of material that some users will never actually see. Loading unused data is probably worse than a connection overhead (considering how easily static content can be served by multiple cheap servers or a CDN)
The other examples are a lot more simple and worthwhile (IMO).
Sprites are a great way of cutting down load-time on graphics (sometimes), and always a way of cutting down requests to the server. Generally speaking, they may take some serious planning as you don't simply want to drop a bunch of images onto a canvas and export as a jpeg. I would suggest you study some sprites currently in use by larger companies like Amazon. Get an idea for how they layout their elements, and what types of images they even consider for use in sprites.
You'll also want to evaluate your site and be sure whether you can successfully implement them or not. If you weren't planning on using them to begin with, it may require a lot of back-tracking and updating to prepare for them.
Amazon Sprite
Ebay Sprite
Current.com Sprite (Whoa)
Google
Sprites work well when you’ve got an element with at least one fixed dimension (width or height), and you want it to have a different background image in different circumstances.
When I’ve tried it, I’ve found that sprite image files tend to be smaller than the total size of the individual images files they’re made from, so you can get bandwidth savings as well as the other two benefits:
fewer HTTP requests
no delay waiting for another image to download when an image state changes on hover
That does depend on the contents of the images though.
Personally, I wouldn’t put unrelated images together in one sprite image, as I think it makes maintenance too non-obvious. Also, as mentioned in To Sprite Or Not To Sprite, really big sprite images can use quite a bit of browser memory. (Whether this is actually a bad thing depends on the context.)
The idea is to avoid unnecessary HTTP requests. This is especially an issue if you have a lot of small icons (say, for a WYSIWYG editor like the one used on this site). If you have twenty 16x16 pixel icons, that won't amount to much bandwidth, but it will still mean twenty extra requests each time the page is loaded.
Other candidates for sprites are button states and anything that's purely decorative but part of the layout.
If you use roll-over background image changes, you'll also find that you'll either have to preload the roll-over state image (either with JS or with silly hardcoding) or you'll encounter some latency as the browser requests the previously unused image. Sprites can alleviate that.
Things you probably shouldn't be making sprites of are pictures that are NOT just graphical elements (e.g. graphs, illustrations, avatars, ads) or that will change a lot (e.g. avatars or ads).
It's not impossible to change sprites, but depending on how much thought you put into the arrangement of the sprite sheet, it may be very hard to do. There's nothing forcing you to make the sprite sheet ultra-condensed, but it's obviously better for the file size if there's not much unnecessary whitespace in it (see Google).
Note that the extra requests may not be a problem for you if you have a relatively low traffic site (which almost everybody has, unless you're Google or Amazon). Sprites may still improve performance for mobile devices, though, as it means less chances for errors and thus lower latency.