I find that centralizing images in css is useful for maintainability. However, if page load time is an issue, it's a good idea to stress test the site with both images in html and css. when they're in html, the height and width tells the browser how big the image is which helps it load a little faster and you can use preload scripts that you can't use for background-images.
Of course you can get fancy with squid or some other caching engine, but even though browsers cache the stylesheet, they do not cache the images linked from the stylesheet so caching is a little more work. ymmv -chris ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
