Navbar – CSS or Image Sprite?

[MonkeyCrumbs]

Hello there, I’m trying to keep up with the ever-changing web and I am just curious if there is any advantage to using an image sprite based navigation bar over pure CSS. CSS3 seems to give us a lot of power over design now, but I wouldn’t even know where to begin on coding a navbar with more complex visual attributes like drop-shadows, borders, gradients, etc. Are there any programs or online resources that you would recommend to make this easier? Do people just rely on random button generators online or do they actually code these things from scratch? The thing I hate about navbars using image sprites is they pixelate when zoomed in and quite frankly they just look terrible on high resolution retina displays.

[Chris House]

Drop shadows, borders and gradients (to use your examples) are all incredibly easy to do with CSS. If you haven’t delved into CSS3 yet you’ll likely be amazed at how powerful it is. Unless I was designing an extraordinarily complex nav menu or I needed complete IE consistency, I’ll always use CSS rather than images.

[Author]

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