Mitchell Waite wrote:
“Limits the artwork” in the sense the middle portion of all you images must be a stretched background slice, so you can’t reproduce all the subtle affects of switching images. You have to produce the end caps from a sliced piece of artwork so this sort of tosses out a lot of high quality graphics.
Yes, that's one of the limitations of this technique. But it's there to facilitate something difficult with other techniques: with the sliding door technique, you can use the same artwork and still allow varying sized items. Instead of creating a button for the text "foo" and a different one for the text "foobarbaz", a single graphic will do both. This only works if you can use an image whose horizontal center will stretch well, but many button and tab images are like that anyway, as you want consistency among the various sized buttons.
If it stretches in the vertical direction too (think bottoms of tab images) then you automatically handle text resizing too. It's a pretty nice technique.
But this is pretty far from JQuery at this point, so I'll shut up. -- Scott
