CSS Sprites and repeating backgrounds

Question

I\'d like to keep all my small images in one sprite file, for example:

Answer 1

I’m not sure if this is in CSS3 already, but the Gecko engine (Firefox 4 …) adds image-rect as -moz-image-rect which allows you to select a specific part of an image for usage. With that you can select a part of your sprite as the background image and then repeat it.

It is definitely not wide-spread or standard yet though.

What I like to do is do 3 kinds of sprites. One with icons, where you don’t use repeats at all, one for horizontal-repeating images, and one for vertical-repeating images.

That way you can add several to be repeated backgrounds to one sprite but not have that much of a hassle using it.