From Google Pagespeed: "Combining images into as few files as possible using CSS sprites reduces the number of round-trips and delays in downloading other resources, reduces request overhead, and can reduce the total number of bytes downloaded by a web page."

I would suggest to combine the language icons into one CSS Sprite!

Thank you for this module!

Comments

Freso’s picture

Freso commented
Version: 7.x-1.0-rc1 » 7.x-1.x-dev
Component: Miscellaneous » Icon collection
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)
the number of round-trips and delays in downloading other resources,
Yes.
reduces request overhead,
Yes.
and can reduce the total number of bytes downloaded
No.

While the two first points are valid, the 3rd one definitely isn't. Far most sites using Language icons (which I have seen), only have a couple (2-3) languages enabled (none use all, I haven't seen any using more than 10). There are around 55 flags in the current collection (which is continuously expanded). Having a sheet containing all the image files thus require you to fetch around 11 times as much data as you need for displaying (using five languages). If you have a site using >40 languages, I can definitely see how fetching a single sheet (even if it has some unused entries) would be preferable to fetching 40 different images, but this is a use case for a very small minority of sites. Without having run tests, I'm fairly sure that for 2-3 language sites, the overhead reduction of the first two do not mitigate the reduced load suggested by the third point.

Not to mention, it'd be much more difficult to maintain a single sheet if you want to also keep the images orderly.

With all that said though: patches are accepted and if I can agree with the approach, I will merge it. It just still needs to be based on single images (a PHP function could join them on a single sheet) and it needs to work without requiring the sheet as well. Won't-fix'ing for now. Feel free to reopen if you have code to submit. :)

(Also, you should update your Language icons to 7.x-1.0 instead of using the old release candidate. Versions prior to 7.x-1.0 contained a security flaw.)

heyyo’s picture

heyyo commented
Status: Closed (won't fix) » Active

I think it could be more effective if the icons were a css background instead of a direct image.
Like this a sprite could be generate by anyone as desired for the languages used, and hover state could be used too.

Language icons will gain in performance and in flexibility.

JulienThomas’s picture

JulienThomas commented

I agree. I created a separated ticket to first handle the CSS background aspect of it, with patch proposal (https://drupal.org/node/2155287). Going into sprite is then next step