Originally Posted by Andrew R I will for navigation and some other elements, but to me, loading every image onto one just seems too excessive to me. Is it faster to load? Yes, but I'd rather have slightly longer loading times (which is really microscopic) than figure out how far the image has to be shifted to show the right one. Also makes it easier if you have to make an edit in the future.

Its also good for Apache or what ever web server you are running (i know it sounds silly, being like Monk), but having to make 20 calls back to the server, when only a few are needed. Then the css comes in and positions it. You get used to the background position formating, it's quite easy. If its 50 pixels down and 300 to the right, it's -300px -50px.

You can never have it into one image (unless your using a PNG which Mobile Me doesn't support IE 6, so thats fine), but certain things you can't have background images for, link lists, etc. because you can't mask what is shown or not.