title: Alternatives to CSS sprites
body: <p>Creating and maintaining CSS sprites is a lot of work. Both creating the sprites and creating the coordinates in the CSS are a burden. Front end technologies such as <a href="http://compass-style.org/help/tutorials/spriting/" rel="nofollow">SASS/Compass spriting</a> helps but requires a build step in the frontend. Are there any alternatives for spriting that still only require one HTTP call without the hassle?</p>
  
  <p>For instance: it would be rather nice to have some sort of zip format that would contain all the images that you'd like to combine into one call but that do not require you to determine coordinates. You'd simply point to the image in the zip and use that. Is there something like this in the works? </p>
  
  <p>edit: The zip idea above was actually a spec in the making. Read about it here: <a href="http://limi.net/articles/resource-packages" rel="nofollow">http://limi.net/articles/resource-packages</a>. They decided to drop the spec in favour for the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPDY" rel="nofollow">SPDY protocol</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_pipelining" rel="nofollow">HTTP pipelining</a>. So I guess there's work being done, but on the protocol level so it can remain backwards compatible.</p>