[In Omnibus]

Originally Posted by scottkoz20

so I could take the forum images, put them on a single file and then have css call in the images as an image map?

Technically you could but sprite sheets work best with smaller images since you have to map the coordinates for each image. They also work best with images that load with every page load since the idea is to save the amount of data required to load with each page.

vBulletin 5 makes good use of sprites for their default images. One complaint has been that it's a lot harder to change the default forum icons because they are now sprites instead of individual png images.

Like everything, there are always positives and negatives. With so much use being on mobile devices now most things are designed with "mobile first" in mind, meaning saving data whenever and wherever possible. But mobile devices have advanced so rapidly that saving data isn't as big an issue as it once was. 5G loads pages from a phone just as quickly as it loads them from a desktop with a cable connection.

I've only glanced at your forums once or twice and only specifically in relation to questions you've asked but if I recall correctly you have a sports card forum, meaning you have thousands of images. You wouldn't want to to try to convert them all to sprites. The time and effort involved in that would far outweigh any potential benefits.