Wim Leers Freelance Drupal Developer

I already mentioned the CSS sprite generator in my article on Drupal's page loading performance. More great news though: they open sourced it! See the blog posts by the authors, Stuart Colville and Ed Eliot.

It's under the BSD license though, so it would never be accepted on Drupal's CVS repositories, which is a must. I contacted the authors, asking if they would be willing to dual-license it under the GPL.

The effects of such a module – if technically possible to generate CSS sprites completely autonomously – would be enormous. It would reduce the number of HTTP requests per page considerably: all CSS background images would be aggregated into a single image!
Even on "just" the Garland theme of a default Drupal 6 installation (this includes a logo and a small Drupal banner at the bottom), this would save 7 HTTP requests per page.