The second interesting sprite use I've discovered in as many days, I stumbled across Amazon's main navigation sprite image last night. I believe the word you're looking for is insane.
Though to be fair, just about everything Amazon does from a front end code perspective is also insane. The things they do to optimize would make your skin crawl.
vormplus, france, jeremy.britton, Wolfr, and 23 other people added this photo to their favorites.
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Fixpert ! 52 months ago | reply
Cool, looks like Dave has captured a lot of this in a nice post on his blog:
mezzoblue.com/archives/2009/01/27/sprite_optim/
matranson 51 months ago | reply
I have come across this before and have used it myself. Its referred to as a CSS "image matrix" (or similar). If you create image rollovers in CSS using background images, using this technique you can shift one big picture around using the 'position' property. This also then prevents the flickering that occurs if the browser has to load multiple separate images for rollovers. I agree, its very clever!
rmckenna 47 months ago | reply
I guess you haven't seen youtube's
s.ytimg.com/yt/img/master-vfl102488.png
Erin Lynch 45 months ago | reply
The complexity is amazing, but I think the idea is a rather smart one.