The designer I'm working with has given me a monster of an implementation issue...
Page background is grey, and atop of it is a crumpled paper texture (non-repeating with painted design elements) for the first 600 pixels (by 1400 pixels across; currently centered as a non-repeating background). At the bottom is another div with more text on it -- with a dropshadow, complex line pattern for the background and ripped edges, hovered slightly above the top div.
Saving the top part as a JPG and the bottom part as a transparent PNG leads to filesizes of +1mb.
Saving the top part as a JPG and the bottom part as a JPG doesn't work very well due to the drop shadow. It would technically work to save the bottom part as a slice with elements of the top part underneath the dropshadow, but it would have to line up pixel-perfect always or else look crappy. And at that point, I might as well save the whole site as one big image...
If the bottom part had a solid colour for the background, I could set each edge to have a different transparent PNG. However, the line pattern on the bottom part means that this wouldn't work.
My question is ultimately:
How the heck do people do ripped edges these days without making their site one big image?
Thanks!
Screengrab:
CSS3 does provide a border-image property, which should be able to help you with the ripped border effect (although even then, it would help if it was a repeating image).
See here for the W3 specification.
However it may not be much use to you, because browser support for this feature isn't great -- IE doesn't support it at all (not even IE9), and while most other browsers do support it, they all currently have gaps in their support and require a vendor prefix in the CSS property.
See CanIUse.com for a full browser support table for it.
To be honest, I think you should just go back to your designer and ask him to make it easier to work with -- he's probably just created something he thinks looks good, but is unaware of the limitations of the design he's put together; if you explain the issue to him, he may well be able to produce something a bit more usable for you.
There's really not a whole lot you can do here.
Page edges are ideally seamlessly repeated via repeat-y, and in your case it looks like the texture is one big image. You're either going to have to settle for sub-par performance or present the designer with your issues.
Check the archive of this blog for a good example.
You either have to fix the background images and use the entire image (or the top image AND the bottom image) and make the background non-scrolling. OR you have to get him to design a pattern that can repeat and then use a smaller PNG.
Clearly, your designer has a print background....
Ok, there's ways that will most likely theoretically work. But theoretical isn't always practical. I suspect your desire is to have cross-browser capability, as all of us should. So, start by throwing most new CSS3 tricks out, thanks to legacy IE. Forget box-shadow, forget crazy png tranparencies without hacks, etc.
What you're left with is doing a gigantic .jpg background. That will load....eventually.....
In this case, you can see the storm on the horizon, so run for cover. Go back to the designer, explain why this is about as smart an idea as texture layered over gradients, and help them understand why our buddies at Microsoft have made this virtually impossible. Just like a fully-flashed out site, it can be done somehow....but it's probably not the best use of time and resources. The web isn't print, it's dynamic...and when you put something "on a page" it's not going to stay put as it would in Illustrator, nor can you guarantee that your user is going it experience it in 100# glossy with a metallic overlay. Yes, I was a designer before I was a developer.....
Sound like a cop-out? Maybe it is. But I've been in your shoes, building sites for credit cards. My team was forced to waste thousands of dollars of the bank's money trying to make sites work with designs that probably shouldn't have been done on the web, thanks to print designers doing double-duty, getting designs approved prior to talking to the tech team....after, of course, we presented management with the options. Ultimately, it got the boss fired for going over budget.
although this is untypical, I would recommend cutting a big square shaped hole in the center of the image so that you're only left with the edges themselves and a transparent center and saving to PNG. Then saving the center part itself as a jpeg and putting the jpeg directly on top of the PNG in the correct position.
This way, the majority of the very large PNG will contain very little data and be a very small file size. The rest of the data would then, obviously, be jpeg and therefore smaller.
Related
I'm currently creating an interactive anatomy app for learning purposes.
I'm starting with a spine module, which contains 24 vertebrae, a pelvis, skull and spinal cord.
Each piece is a separate transparent image of the same size, and each are layered top to bottom.
This works and looks great! The problem is, it is extremely processor intensive. Adding and removing little pieces, zooming in, almost any interaction at all is VERY slow.
Is there a way to layer all of those images in a performant manner? I would like for a student to be able to remove a lamina, and have that vertebrae swap out the image. Or to zoom in on only the Lumbar vertebrae and interact there.
What approach, technology, etc should I be looking at?
https://jsfiddle.net/whetw8o5/1/
Fiddle for reference.
Fiddle contains a transition tag for height, so you can easily use a tool and modify the height of the parent #spineo tag and see how much trouble it has.
Fiddle performs better than my site because it is by itself.
So I am making this horizontal scroll site which has a ton of images. I planned on using svgs for the entire site, but with only 20-30 svg images of medium to high complexity used in the page, and chrome already seems to be showing som jank and high paint times for scroll (and firefox is even worse, though safari seems to do a lot better).
Scroll timeline
View the site (scroll works on mac only, windows users can use arrow keys)
My question is, if I were to use pngs instead of svgs, would it reduce the paint times and hence the jank? Why is the browser struggling with only around 20 odd svg images?
As was my doubt, the problem turned out to be something completely different. Browsers are more than capable of handling multiple vector images. But what they aren't good at (and understandably so) is at redrawing those images very often.
Problem
My long horizontal scroll site was quite wide (30,000px). I had a background-color property applied to one of lower z-index'ed div's to represent the sky throughout the scroll site. I didn't want the sky to stretch the entire 30,000px since it essentially didn't change much, and hence gave it viewport width and height, with:
position:fixed;
Not a very smart move. Turns out that this property was causing my document layer to be repainted on every frame. Initially I though it was normal for browsers to do so on scroll, since Robby Leonardi's site, which I used as reference also repainted every frame.
Solution
Thanks to this article by one of the chrome dev tools developers, I set aside conventional wisdom, and make the sky layer
position:absolute;
and stretched it the entire site width, and boom! The paint rectangles were gone. And the scroll performance was smoother than butter.
Other solutions I tried
Hiding elements not near the viewport to make painting lighter, as suggested by #philipp, but didn't yeild any appreciable difference. Also, it felt super-hacky, and it wasn't targeting the root cause of the problem.
I tried modularizing my site into scenes and using translateZ(0) hack on each scene so that only the smaller scenes get repainted instead of the document. This actually helped quite a bit, and scroll was decent. Then,
I gave all the svg images their own layer by using translateZ(0). I started getting FPS of around 60 now, but again, this wasn't the right way of doing things.
I once had a similar thing. The SVG was 10 or more times as wide as the one shown above, it contained ~20k elements and was about 3MB in size. The only Thing what brought back performance (since it was a jump and run game) was an algorithm which was able to find all elements whose bounding box overlapped the viewport. With this I could use display: none; to hide everything what is invisible.
That reduced the amout of visible elements to ~150 per frame and the game ran again fluently.
I used a balanced binary tree (avl tree) and a one dimensional range query, since the height of the viewport was always the same as the image.
Good luck!
[EDIT]
Forgot to leave something like an anwer. From my Experience are large/huge SVG Graphics a bottleneck in rendering, especially if there is a lot of scripting happening. If you do not need any Interactivity with the elements from the Graphic, so nothing than a large Background Image, I would recommend to use a Tile map, based on PNG images, that is the standard way in Jump'n'Run games with huges »worlds«, so you can gain perfomance in two Points:
Rendering is faster,
You can »lazy ajax load« tiles, depending on visibility, to prevent users to download the »whole world« at startup.
Additinally you could use something like PIXI.js to render with WebGL, what will push the performance drastically and with it comes support for Tilemaps and Spritesheets.
If you insist on the advantages of Vector Grafics (Scaling, Interactivity) than you need to find a way to hide as much elements as possible to keep the frame rate high.
I've seen this discussion back and forth, and I know traditionally background image is NOT supported in outlook 2010. But I have also seen it done. Some designs require live text.
What is the ultimate synopsis, just don't use -- or try to hack? If a hack, what is the best one? (most supported)
As long as the design is not reliant on absolutes, I say go for it. Support is as large as it has ever been on background image usage and with some tweaks and 'hacks' you can get your emails looking great (even on Outlook!).
Best place to go is bulletproof backgrounds they will give you the code (HTML/CSS and VML for outlook) for both a bg image for a TD and a bg image for whole email. This is a great leaping off point and helps do most of the leg work for you right off the bat.
When positioning your children over the image in parent container, I would make sure to reference CSS compatability across each email client and do acid test after acid test to make sure it is displaying as you wanted.
It may take a bit of extra work, but the results can be more than worth it.
I am coding a WordPress theme from a design that has been provided to me. Each post (in the design) is on a background that looks like a piece of paper:
The issue is that (of course) I don't know how long each blog post will be. I want to slice and dice the image in such a way that it will repeat to fill the blog post div as needed, while still maintaining the look it was designed to have (including the rough edges with transparency, etc.)
I've considered several different ways of accomplishing this, like creating a top, kludged-repeatable middle, and bottom, but everything I've tried is pretty clunky and requires large (filesize) images.
I'm asking here in case there is some technique I should be using but don't know about. I'm having a hard time explaining to Google what I'm looking for, so I'd be grateful for even hints on what keywords to search for.
Might want to consider border images (though apparently no support from IE)
Nowadays, you can have multiple background images and/or gradients. (IE9 does support, but gradient support is all over the place in most browsers; you'd probably have to find a gradient generator like http://www.colorzilla.com/gradient-editor/ or use css3pie http://css3pie.com/demos/gradient-patterns/ (or both) Don't forget, because you can have multiple background images, you could create some effect with alpha transparency on your images as well.
You can't. There are two options for faking it.
Create a really long (large) image and assume that no post will go over a certain length.
Create a top and bottom image "cap" and repeat in the middle. You can make the repeating image large enough that it looks kind of random, but it really isn't.
The real solution is to go back to the designer and tell them this just isn't possible. A real-world solution would be to create a background image that fades to some solid color. That way you can define the background like background: #000 url('your-image.png') no-repeat center top; and have the image fade to black (or brown as indicated by your screenshot).
When designing my homepage, I feel like the common knowledge is that it is bad to just have one big picture in the center that gives all of the content. The "right" way to do it would be to chop up the large layed out image into several small backgrounds and make the text use standard html with css background images for layout.
Is the only reason one big image is bad SEO reasons?
A search engine can't make sense of it.
A blind or otherwise visually-impaired person can't make sense of it.
Someone blocking images because he's on a mobile phone with expensive internet can't make sense of it.
There are a few reasons :-)
Also important:
Changes are not easily made to whole, pre-composited images, unless you still have access to the original layered variants. And hopefully they contain text as well, not just pixel data. (Mentioned by others before already. Credits go to pierre and Kendrick)
If you're using background images don't forget to set a text and background color too. Otherwise people not seeing any images might have a hard time deciphering your text (black on black isn't nice to read :-))
You can still use one large image as background. How the text is layed out above that is another matter entirely. In fact, chopping up the image and piecing the pieces together is painful using CSS too. In my experience it's best and easiest to leave background images unchopped and instead composite the rest of the layout above them, using other images or backgrounds if needed. This gives you a little more flexibility when changing a layout again, too.
SEO is one. Handicapped accessibility is another big one -- a screen reader can't read text within an image, typically. Page load time is another one; a user with a slow connection won't see anything useful while the image loads. Lastly, many browsers will use multiple connections to request resources such as images, so they can be loaded simultaneously. If there's just one image, only one connection can be used.
Updating will be tedious; you can also no longer rely on many benefits of CSS.
It's also bad for accessibility (screen readers, text-resizing, different monitor sizes)
It also removes your ability to easily edit text content.
I certainly wouldn't do it if you're looking for a web-developer job, but if you really don't care about the above, you won't be the first person to do it...
I see no reason at all in using imagea to represent something what can easily be achieved with HTML and CSS.
You're putting up a web site to enable communication between you and your visitors. Images and Flash prevent that.
Generally, you design a site with HTML/CSS and text. Only when you wish to add some design that cannot be expressed with standard means, then you use images. But have your site degrade gracefully for those who cannot or does not wish to see images. Let images be an addition, like an advanced version, in no case a replacement for text.