CSS Performance: UI with Fewer Images

Often performance improvements come with their drawbacks, sometimes improving performance causes pains in other parts of the development process or strips stuff from the final product. Sometimes there’s even a conflict where you have to pick: slow, unusable and beautiful or fast and looking like hacked with a blunt axe. But it doesn’t have to be this way. This post outlines some approaches to achieving common UI elements using CSS tricks in as many browsers as possible while using as fewer images as possible. Some of the tricks are brand new, some are very, very old. They all have in common the “fewer or no images” mantra. Using fewer images comes with some pronounced benefits…