[skalie]

Wouldn't that slow down a site? just for something like this.....

[twhid]

the graphic you've posted could tile easily so why not do that.

[skalie]

Pardon my bad, I dragged and dropped that background image (borrowed from this site) and it showed up as 116 KB using SNAX (alternative to Finder).

I have since opened up the image in Photoshop, and it is indeed only 7 KB.

What's going on I'm not sure, but I guess that will teach me for being a smartass.

* goes off to the corner with a dunces hat on *

[hyperizer]

Only with a resource fork. On your Web server it should look more like 152 bytes. I didn't check, but presumably you already reduced the color palette as much as possible. You could get away with a smaller version of the image too (you really only need one horizontal line and enough whitespace so it tiles as stripes).

[Millennium]

Originally posted by hyperizer:
Only with a resource fork. On your Web server it should look more like 152 bytes. I didn't check, but presumably you already reduced the color palette as much as possible. You could get away with a smaller version of the image too (you really only need one horizontal line and enough whitespace so it tiles as stripes).

Take care, however, that you don't make the image too small. Images, especially tiled ones, take time to draw. If you make the image too small, it will slow down your site's rendering dramatically, and this can be a massive pain for users with slower machines, because the slow rendering will affect such niceties as scrolling even after the download is finished.

64x64 is generally a good size to use, though 128x128 is even better if the image crunches down nice and tight. That strikes a good balance between download and render speed.

[hyperizer]

Good point Millennium. I hardly ever use tiled images, so I haven't done much testing in that regard.

[brainchild2b]

That's huge for a tiled image, if the lines are 2pixels thick each then you should only need a 4 pixel image 1x4 horz/vert.

[philzilla]

Originally posted by brainchild2b:
That's huge for a tiled image, if the lines are 2pixels thick each then you should only need a 4 pixel image 1x4 horz/vert.

see above comment, about how the browser draws the screen, brainiac

there's nothing wrong with using a 64x64, for that kind of background image. it will probably come in at under 5k anyway, if you do it right

[JoNoiD]

Originally posted by Millennium:

Take care, however, that you don't make the image too small. Images, especially tiled ones, take time to draw. If you make the image too small, it will slow down your site's rendering dramatically, and this can be a massive pain for users with slower machines, because the slow rendering will affect such niceties as scrolling even after the download is finished.

64x64 is generally a good size to use, though 128x128 is even better if the image crunches down nice and tight. That strikes a good balance between download and render speed.

You have an excellent point. I never even considered anything like this. Previously, with an image like the one posted above, I would make it something like 4px width and 1px height. That is really good insight.