Tag: images

CSS Sprites and Accessibility

Yahoo’s Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site lists minimizing HTTP requests as the very first recommendation. One of the ways they suggest doing that is by using CSS sprites (which I mentioned previously in Clever Ways to Save Bandwidth).

I recently applied this technique to a series of social media icons. Here’s an example:
http://osric.com/chris/css-sprites-social-media-icons-example.html

The example page uses a single image to display 8 separate icons from the following single image:

CSS sprites of social media icons

Be careful when using background images as links. Continue reading CSS Sprites and Accessibility

Using SharePoint’s Imaging Web Service to access Publishing Images

I spent a fair amount of time yesterday trying to access the images in the Images list (also known as Publishing Images) of a SharePoint site using the SOAP-based Imaging web service. Every time it failed, usually with an uninformative error message.

Finally, I used cURL to send the SOAP requests so that I could see every last detail of the transaction. The SOAP response was pretty clear at that point:

The list PublishingImages is not found

or

The list Images is not found

I tried other Picture Libraries on the site, and that worked fine. That’s when it dawned on me: the SharePoint Images (or PublishingImages) list is a Document Library, not a Picture Library. That makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, but fine, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve run into something nonsensical in SharePoint.

I was hoping to use the download method of the Imaging web service. I don’t have an alternative solution at this time, but I hope to find one soon using one of the other SharePoint web services.