Repeating Background Image Size

[James]

Hi All,

My site design has a repeating background image that scrolls down the
left hand side of the page, it's a mere 256px by 16px. However, the
nature of the design means that the image would work if it was only
1px in height.

A long long time ago I read on a site about optimizing web pages that
said to _not_ use images 1px high for repeating backgrounds because
browsers struggle to show so many instances of an image on the screen.
In these days of 256mb ram minimum on even old machines does this
still apply (if it ever did) or can I use this image.

Say my viewport is 800px high, a 16px high image is rendered by the
browser 50 times but a 1px high image is rendered 800 times.

Anybody have any thoughts?

 

[Neredbojias]

Well bust mah britches and call me cheeky, on Thu, 09 Aug 2007 10:59:49 GMT
James scribed:

Hi All,

My site design has a repeating background image that scrolls down the
left hand side of the page, it's a mere 256px by 16px. However, the
nature of the design means that the image would work if it was only
1px in height.

A long long time ago I read on a site about optimizing web pages that
said to _not_ use images 1px high for repeating backgrounds because
browsers struggle to show so many instances of an image on the screen.
In these days of 256mb ram minimum on even old machines does this
still apply (if it ever did) or can I use this image.

Say my viewport is 800px high, a 16px high image is rendered by the
browser 50 times but a 1px high image is rendered 800 times.

Anybody have any thoughts?

I used a 2x2 gif one time wherein 2 of the 4 pixels were transparent, and
ie6 struggled just rendering that. When you scrolled the page, the part
with this background like kind of "stuck" for a sec or 2. On the other
hand, Mozilla (-pre Firefox) had no trouble with it.

 

[Andy Dingley]

A long long time ago I read on a site about optimizing web pages that
said to _not_ use images 1px high for repeating backgrounds

Its current irrelevance is obvious, but just where and when did you
find such a snippet that was _never_ correct?