threadless uses it on their footer but i’ve seen it before.
yes you’re right some of those are in the header too but that part of the site is a similar function as the footer. maybe something to do with the fact that it’s recurring?
the one that confused me the most is why it had to be used for the social network icons because they don’t have rollover states.
interesting concept nonetheless, thanks for letting me know what it is.
Hi,
They are useful because you decrease a lot the http requests to the server… so your site instead of “downloading” a bunch of different images, it will just download 1.
What do you mean by ocurring in the footer? As you can see in that sprite, they have all the images in that one you posted (from footer, header, etc). By the way, this is generally done with decorative images (buttons, round corners, etc).
what is the advantage of using them? why do they often occur in the footer?
It’s called CSS sprites. THey combine all images into 1 file and then they access parts of the image to show certain image by using background-position
You might find that interesting :).