image question

"Custom images are meant for using either in the CSS or HTML templates. They can be of any size up to 400 by 400 pixels. They can be either in GIF, JPEG or PNG formats, but the image files must not have more than 200KB each."

Hi Manuel, could images can be check to allow total space of images?
what I mean is 400px by 400px is a total space of 160000px.
if ((imagesx($image) * imagesy($image)) <= 160000 ){
return $uploadimageerror;
}
or however you are checking.

The reason I ask is because sometimes you want to combine your images and use as a sprite page ( saves on image loading calls from the web browser ). A sprite page might be easier on the with a top and bottom which could be as little as 22px in height, but over 400px in width, it just makes it easier for others. I'm using gd to create images, so I make an output coordinates file. but some participants might want to use full page backgrounds for like headers and footers, which could also be over 400 px in length, the minimal might be for a width of maybe 125px x 1280px and can well be under 200kb especially in JPEG format.

I can work with these settings no problem, but I am not as artistically talented as some of the other participants who might want to use images like this.

Don't worry about sprites. In production, the site uses a static server for serving images, so they will not be loaded in your browser more than once.

The size limits are imposed to avoid the temptation of some authors to use very heavy images that delay the first page load.

"Don't worry about sprites. In production, the site uses a static server for serving images, so they will not be loaded in your browser
more than once."
that I know, lol. A users browser cache usually takes care of that too.
What I meant was the latency of multiple http get requests for images on the first page load with an empty browser cache.

I know that technique but I could not see enough gains to justify using it, as it only affects the first page access.

Other than that, static files, like images and CSS, are served from a domain that is distinct from the site page domain. So it will not impose any slow down or significant server resources that would motivate adopting that technique.

Thanks for the suggestion anyway.

What if you want to have some sort of tiling background image. Those are usually 980px x 12px and are only 2-5kb.

I think just limiting filesize makes more sense because wide but short images are very useful.

Maybe you are right, but right now I am not going to change the rules because 12 designs were submitted and the contest deadline is just a few days away. Maybe next year, sorry.

Okay. That sound reasonable.

Maybe before next year's you can gather comments on the competition's rules before it begins to prevent something like this happening.

Also, I would like to congratulate you on keeping your cool when many people in other redesign related threads have been throwing searing insults at you.

also, I forgot to mention, do we need to support IE6?

Thanks for understanding.

The contest was first announced in September last year. Despite it was mentioned several times since them in the site blog, very few people tried the system to provide feedback.

Only in the last week before the original deadline the first 3 submissions appeared. Only then people started complained about the system limitations. It is a bit too late to complain.

Anyway, I was aware the system would not be perfect, but we all already learned important details that can be improved next time.

Some people think they should bother to support IE with some hacks.

What may happen is that somebody that uses IE6 looks at theme that does not look well on that browser and may not vote on the theme.

On the other hand, the share of all IE versions is less than 16% of the logged users.

phpclasses.org/browse/statistics/st ...

Google Analytics says that less than 5% of the visitors use IE 6. So, maybe you should not bother. But that is just an opinion.