When I test the FCKeditor, the slowest part of everything is the loading of the many icons on/off states. Because most browsers can only take a small number (4) of downloads at a time, I'm wondering if anyone has considered using a sprite imaging technnique that uses CSS? I believe it matches the same browsers that FCK2 is targeting and is described on A List Apart:
<http://www.alistapart.com/articles/sprites/>
Basically, by creating a single image with both the on/off states for _every_ icon, you can hide/position the image appropriately with CSS to handle every single on/off state. I wonder if this would substantially speed up the load?
Has anyone tried this? Considered it? Any reasons it wouldn't work?
For whatever reason, each time I load the editor, I don't seem to get the benefit of any caching so the same relatively slow loading occurs each time.
I tested this on Win XP with both Moz 1.7 and IE 6.
Brian
Mon, 09/27/2004 - 07:01
#1
RE: Slow icon loading- fix with sprite techni
That would work great, I think. The button-switching is indeed very slow on mozilla/firefox.
I'll look into this when I have a bit more time...
Bart
this link from the sprite article says it all:
http://www.pixy.cz/blogg/clanky/cssnopreloadrollovers/
RE: Slow icon loading- fix with sprite technique?
Sounds great! I think that will really push the performance up a notch which in turn makes it more usable.
Any estimates on a release date? Trying to coordinate whether or not we can integrate 2.0 into an app launch we have coming up about 4 weeks out.
Btw, that above link has been moved to:http://wellstyled.com/css-nopreload-rollovers.html