optimize the sprite image

[freyfogle]

I just made a sprite and then ran the page I use it on through Google Page Speed and it turned out the sprite image could be optimized (ie made smaller). See

see https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/best-practices/payload?csw=1#CompressImages

would be great if CSS::SpriteMaker did that for me

[darksmo]

CSS::SpriteMaker is not concerned with the optimization of the resulting sprite image... there are great tools already for doing that. One could easily optimize a sprite image through optipng, for example, with:

use IPC::Run3 qw(run3);
run3(["optipng", "-o 7", "/path/to/your/sprite.png"], undef, undef, undef);

[freyfogle]

hmm, under what circumstances would I want to make a sprite (ie I am interested in improving performance), but I don't want it optimized (ie I don't care about performance)?

[darksmo]

Imagine to be setting up a watcher for your images/ directory. As soon as an image enters the folder, the watcher could run your Perl script, generating a new sprite.

In this development workflow you usually won't care about optimizing the sprite every time - but you care about having the sprite ready as soon as possible. You will be likely to download it over a local connection anyway...

So I agree on having an optimization step after all. I just don't think it's obvious to run the optimization after the sprite is generated. Again, there are already very nice tools that focus 100% on image optimization... and using them takes two lines as shown in my previous comment. I could write a wrapper around optipng perhaps, and provide a $SpriteMaker->optimize_sprite($path); with sensible default options... uhmm...