Is there any problem you can think of having an image sprite that is 30px × 27,900px
the image is almost 90% white space. its only 9.5kb but something just doesn't seem right about having something this big running in a browser.
Thoughts or ideas?
Just because it's 9.5Kb on disk, doesn't mean that it won't occupy a large amount of memory in the browser, which has to decompress the image before it can be displayed. (The final size depends on the compression used, etc.)
As such, whilst it'll obviously cost an extra connection I'd recommend breaking this down into smaller images if at all possible.
FWIW, Browser performance doesn't seem to degrade when there are massive offsets (such as hiding a
Image processing is often done with two dimensional arrays, and thus access to any part of the image can be done quite easily and without requiring linear traversal. So if you indicate that an 16x16 pixel icon is located at 5000, 3000 the rendering engine can locate those pixels quite easily.
Of course, the two obvious questions are: