So completely off topic, but I was curious about what trade the guy with the flags was (I'm assuming signals), so I opened the image in a new tab hoping the filename would clue me in. Instead, the image is just a big tall stack of all the icons.
I'm not a software guy, but does Reddit seriously load in this massive image file for every user with an icon, then just crop it to the desired one? Is that not just a massive fuck you to bandwidth optimization?
Yes, that's a common method of inserting tiny icons on web pages. CSS is used to select the correct icon. The total image you're talking about is "only" 65k, so relatively speaking not too much of a hit on bandwidth. It's assumed that users are going to see many of the icons anyway, and there's a small overhead for every individual request, so sending the whole icon sheet at once might actually use less data.
So completely off topic, but I was curious about what trade the guy with the flags was (I'm assuming signals), so I opened the image in a new tab hoping the filename would clue me in. Instead, the image is just a big tall stack of all the icons.
I'm not a software guy, but does Reddit seriously load in this massive image file for every user with an icon, then just crop it to the desired one? Is that not just a massive fuck you to bandwidth optimization?
Yes, that's a common method of inserting tiny icons on web pages. CSS is used to select the correct icon. The total image you're talking about is "only" 65k, so relatively speaking not too much of a hit on bandwidth. It's assumed that users are going to see many of the icons anyway, and there's a small overhead for every individual request, so sending the whole icon sheet at once might actually use less data.