I was researching ways to compress sprite sheets further.
I found a plug-in for Gimp that creates sprite sheets out of layers. That should save me some minutes.
And I'm not sure what lead me to this discovery but I found out that for the last 5 years it was possible to convert images into a base64 encoded string and embed it directly into html/css as URIs cutting down on server requests.
I'm wondering if we had a [css] bbcode we could just embed resources using something like
http://dataurl.net/#dataurlmaker and not worry about image hosts deleting inactive accounts.
Although I wonder if embedded images like that would show up in image searches.