Performance should be a concern of yours if you do front end work. Speed is of the essence, and it’s (rightfully) becoming a focus. A simple thing to do to boost page speed and performance is to reduce HTTP requests. There’s science behind it, but the generalist view is: the fewer HTTP requests the better. A stellar way to reduce requests is to use image sprites in your style layer.
A sprite is a conglomeration of all the (non-repeating) image assets of your design into a single image to be referenced and obscured and in doing so having a single HTTP request to retrieve any number of pseudo-‘images’. The trouble with spriting is that it takes planning and can be tedious. Luckily, spriting can be automated to a certain extent, and tools like Spritemapper make that a bit easier.
Spritemapper seems very well put together, and I can not wait to find an automated solution that will help me not have to keep track of my sprites manually.