What this is:

It analyzes an html page, looks for images, then substitutes them with divs that render the appropriate portion of a sprite that contains the original images.

The purpose is to have only one request per page for all the images on that page.

How do I hope to achieve this:

• Page is generated by whatever backend there is and sent back to apache as a response.

• Before Apache passes on the response to the client, a filter intercepts the response and does some analysis and transformations on the HTML source:

  • Replace all <img> tags with <div> tags with a uniquely named class attached to it.
  • Construct a mapping from the class of each <div> that replaced an <img> tag to the original URL of respective image.
  • Generate CSS to populate <div> tags with original images cut out from a generated sprite. The generated sprite is assumed to be a column stacking of all the original images.
  • A request to any image is mapped by Apache to a controller that serves the generated sprite from the original image URLs.

• Browser ends up sending only one request for all the images.

• Images end up being rendered just as if they have been if they were still in image tags.