Interesting question.
Slicing an image was a necessary part of creating a table based design to ensure that the table cells aligned properly to preserve the design. Designers sometimes used image slicing to improve the perceived responsiveness of a site by providing some visual feedback that the site was loading.
This is far less an issue with CSS based design because the positioning of elements is created via declarations in the stylesheet.
The only situation I'm aware of where image slicing is necessary in table less designs is for the various sliding doors techniques to get the left and right sides of tabs or round cornered boxes.
Personally I wouldn't slice an image without a really good reason (I can't think of a really good reason right now), and the decision to slice up a large image is a decision you need to balance with the requirements of the site:
1. Is the image essential to the design? Or does it work without it? 2. Does slicing an image make the site (appear) more responsive? 3. What is the trade off between one trip to the server v. many trips 4. How complicated is it (in markup) to reconstruct the image in a browser?
./tdw
On 2004-11-16 6:19 AM, Marilyn Langfeld wrote:
I haven't seen any discussions about slicing images, with regards to web standards. I expect slicing is discouraged, since it is table-based. What do you do if you want to use a fairly large image in a design
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