[whatwg] Built-in image sprite support in HTML5

David Weitzman dweitzman at gmail.com
Fri May 21 10:12:50 PDT 2010


There are various approaches to using image sprites with HTML and CSS,
but at the end of the day they are all essentially hacks. A solution
that would be simpler than any existing approach would be to introduce
new attributes for <img> to specify x and y offsets and clipping on
images. With that you would get simpler markup for sprites and better
accessibility.

One downside of this approach is that with background image sprites
you can have a CSS class that abstracts away the name of the sprite
image. With <img> tags you would have to specify the URL and
height/width individually on every sprited image.

Thoughts?

- David


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