That's the question I've been asking myself now, these days. For it's time, this was a pretty revolutionary idea. The technique has been around for many years now, really catching on by the late 2000's. These days, however, with HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, the overall benefit of bundling images together into one (to reduce HTTP overhead due to TCP/IP latency + protocol overhead) it's becoming theoretically less important. This is assuming your server is using those new protocols and the connecting clients support it as well (most modern browsers support HTTP/2 right out of the box). I say "theoretically" because we need benchmarking to be more certain.
I ended up stepping back and asking myself this question thanks to the fact that a 5yr-6yr old grunt workflow we already had setup was becoming cumbersome to manage, beginning to fail due to legacy module/node reasons (especially since phantomjs is is now a... ghost). I personally still see a huge value in "spriting" single color SVG's into a font (due to the flexibility of being able to easily colorize) but I've begun to wonder if it's still worthwhile for PNG/GIF (bitmaps) and colorized SVG's (vectors), considering the benefits of the alternative, i.e.: Lower maintenance (reduced legacy support), the ability to inline SVG into an already gzip'd or brotli'd page and better caching (by keeping them separate), as noted elsewhere.
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Is it still worth it, though? 🤔
That's the question I've been asking myself now, these days. For it's time, this was a pretty revolutionary idea. The technique has been around for many years now, really catching on by the late 2000's. These days, however, with HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, the overall benefit of bundling images together into one (to reduce HTTP overhead due to TCP/IP latency + protocol overhead) it's becoming theoretically less important. This is assuming your server is using those new protocols and the connecting clients support it as well (most modern browsers support HTTP/2 right out of the box). I say "theoretically" because we need benchmarking to be more certain.
I ended up stepping back and asking myself this question thanks to the fact that a 5yr-6yr old
gruntworkflow we already had setup was becoming cumbersome to manage, beginning to fail due to legacy module/node reasons (especially sincephantomjsis is now a... ghost). I personally still see a huge value in "spriting" single color SVG's into a font (due to the flexibility of being able to easily colorize) but I've begun to wonder if it's still worthwhile for PNG/GIF (bitmaps) and colorized SVG's (vectors), considering the benefits of the alternative, i.e.: Lower maintenance (reduced legacy support), the ability to inline SVG into an alreadygzip'd orbrotli'd page and better caching (by keeping them separate), as noted elsewhere.