CSS Sprites

[redtom]

Has anyone here been using them? If so has it effected the load times of pages at all?

I've been considering using them but I dont think it would speed up the load times enough to warrent even bothering with them.

[Apolva]

For things like rollover buttons, I find it much easier to have two images, and pre-load the other with JS.

That said, if you're gonna need lots of images, I'd probably try it and see.

eg. http://www.google.co.uk/images/nav_logo8.png

[MattFr]

It's only there to lower the amount of HTTP requests. Completely pointless on a low traffic site unless you have like, 1MB of bandwidth a month.

[redtom]

I know about the requests on the server but the load time of the file is "suppost" to be effected aswell I'm just not sure if its noticeable or not.
I read somewhere that its quicker to download one file then 2 smaller files of equal size, so I'm just wondering if anyone has noticed a diffrence if they've used it.

[MattFr]

Well considering you would only blit with small images on a sprite sheet, I don't think you would actually notice the difference, even if there was one.

[Apolva]

I know about the requests on the server but the load time of the file is "suppost" to be effected aswell I'm just not sure if its noticeable or not.
I read somewhere that its quicker to download one file then 2 smaller files of equal size, so I'm just wondering if anyone has noticed a diffrence if they've used it.

Well with regards to that, it makes a huge difference if you download 50 large images compared to 950 individually.
See: http://habbopfm.com/
Against: http://bobbavalues.com/?go=rares

[Agnostic Bear]

It's pretty stupid for anyone who has latency under 400ms (which is essentially the entire world). However if the site garners a lot of unique hits or has an absolute truckload of images to load at once it's advisable to use the sprite method as it'll cut down on the iops speeding up other such things.

Edit:
Simple answer no.
Complex answer possibly.