alt Hacker NewsI think animation was the less common use case. Sprites were a nice way to get multiple images in a single HTTP request. Latency on dialup was murder and getting more in a single round trip was better. If you have a bunch of similarly-sized elements stick them all in a single file and use CSS to make multiple references to the same file display different images.
Replies
xnx • yesterday at 6:09 PM
Also a workaround for per host connection limits.
Additionally, the file size of the sprite sheet image is often smaller than the combined file sizes of the individual images. (I never looked into why but expect it has to do with sharing overhead and the compression dictionary)