I think it could bring (probably the greatest speed improvement) if you improve the way it loads forums icons as sprite in order to reduce the amount of requests. IPS doesn't use forum specific icons, but we do. We've got 20-30 forums and that means we've got 20-30 additional requests for each forum's icon.

The same would apply for combining CSS and JS files. For this purpose one may use mod_pagespeed so this is not important at all for me, but my sprite suggestion is :-).

Wy dont you use fontawesome icon with css?

11 hours ago, SammyS said:

Wy dont you use fontawesome icon with css?

Because that doesn't fit my needs? Also I am not sure if that's even possible. Just for clarification: I am talking about such forum icons:

48 minutes ago, inkredible said:

Because that doesn't fit my needs? Also I am not sure if that's even possible. Just for clarification: I am talking about such forum icons:

I see. I use font awesome icons as they speed your forum. But they have not colors as yours...

 

 

 

5 minutes ago, SammyS said:

I see. I use font awesome icons as they speed your forum. But they have not colors as yours...

 

 

 

Doesn't look bad either and performance wise this is probably the best

You can create SVG Sprites which allow full colour and fast loading...

https://css-tricks.com/svg-sprites-use-better-icon-fonts/

I remember in early development of 4.0 we talked about using sprites for emoticons. But then I was like "how do you explain sprites to people?" and we quickly decided that would be complicated  

1 minute ago, Charles said:

I remember in early development of 4.0 we talked about using sprites for emoticons. But then I was like "how do you explain sprites to people?" and we quickly decided that would be complicated  

It would have been better, tbh - emoticons would look superb at any resolution, etc.

When you say 'how do we explain sprites to people?', do you mean admins, or end-users? End users I would imagine wouldn't need to know how sprites work...

21 minutes ago, Joy Rex said:

You can create SVG Sprites which allow full colour and fast loading...

https://css-tricks.com/svg-sprites-use-better-icon-fonts/

Maybe I am not aware, but what I was using to assign my Icon to the forum is the built in "edit forum" feature:  .

 

How would that work? Are you referring to theme changes?

3 hours ago, Joy Rex said:

It would have been better, tbh - emoticons would look superb at any resolution, etc.

When you say 'how do we explain sprites to people?', do you mean admins, or end-users? End users I would imagine wouldn't need to know how sprites work...

Or just use Unicode standard emojis which most browsers support now... 

You should leverage browser caching and cache static images. 

 

Sprites are great if you let create them once by an expert for one site and then its done. But since IPS allows anyone to upload individual icons at any time for any forum, how would those sprites even be created? You would have to rely on the server-side image library to open the sprite image, add or change a part of it and then save it again with the perfect automatic compression, that neither makes the image too large nor ruins the image quality (with every new save). I can’t really imagine that as stock feature. 

On 3/24/2017 at 2:17 PM, Jacques Corby-Tuech said:

Or just use Unicode standard emojis which most browsers support now... 

Yeah, that would be good for a default set (which would satisfy most communities), but some sites have their own which have meaning to them.

On 3/24/2017 at 3:23 PM, opentype said:

Sprites are great if you let create them once by an expert for one site and then its done. But since IPS allows anyone to upload individual icons at any time for any forum, how would those sprites even be created? You would have to rely on the server-side image library to open the sprite image, add or change a part of it and then save it again with the perfect automatic compression, that neither makes the image too large nor ruins the image quality (with every new save). I can’t really imagine that as stock feature. 

I hadn't thought about that - you're right, IPS would need server-side processes to compile new icons/emoji into a sprite file, be it SVG or traditional bitmap graphics. That being said, if SVG sprites were used, that's essentially appending to a text file to put it simply.

On 3/24/2017 at 10:49 AM, inkredible said:

Maybe I am not aware, but what I was using to assign my Icon to the forum is the built in "edit forum" feature:  .

 

How would that work? Are you referring to theme changes?

If IPS 4 supported SVG in addition to traditional image formats, you could create SVG versions of these icons and use them just like that. The biggest hurdle is in the IPS interface and templates, where instead of an IMG tag, it would be an SVG tag or a SPAN tag. It would be a pretty big change to implement.

6 hours ago, Joy Rex said:

Yeah, that would be good for a default set (which would satisfy most communities), but some sites have their own which have meaning to them.

 

Yeah definitely. It just makes sense to do if people care about speed though. 

Well actually I am fine with creating the sprite by myself / I'll inform myself about it, but would it even be possible to use these sprites then without making code changes?

On 3/24/2017 at 5:32 PM, Charles said:

But then I was like "how do you explain sprites to people?" and we quickly decided that would be complicated  

Did nobody ask the "How do we explain not being able to reply to status updates directly from the sidebar to people?" question?

17 hours ago, Elena-Viorica said:

Did nobody ask the "How do we explain not being able to reply to status updates directly from the sidebar to people?" question?

Because the feature was removed, there was no need for an explanation 

17 hours ago, inkredible said:

Well actually I am fine with creating the sprite by myself / I'll inform myself about it, but would it even be possible to use these sprites then without making code changes?

No, there would need to be (at least) theme changes, since invoking a sprite (with CSS) is different than calling an image via CSS or directly via an IMG tag. You're essentially showing that part of the sprite map with coordinates so only that sprite in question shows.