Using Sprites to reduce latency & speed up forums

Hello,

I've noticed that alot of images load when WWF is first loaded in a browser. There's about 20 or so objects which means alot of HTTP requests and latency due to these requests.

Could sprites be developed to combine images so that this loading performance issue dissapears?

Although WWF content is generated super fast on the server- this is fairly standard, most decent ASP applications execute very quickly and send out there wonderful dynamic creation in a very short time. Which is usually only 20% or less of the actual users experience of the loading time. The rest is image + css + javascript etc - and the latency that goes with them.

I recently read an article, this one:
http://yuiblog.com/blog/2006/11/28/performance-research-part-1/

It's not an amazing article but it's pretty cool to take into account the factors mentioned.

Days earlier I had noticed that even on my fast connection the very first load of WWF on an empty cache is a little bit slowed- based on latency of lots of small images I reckon.

Anyway WWF is absolutely excellent, but I just thought I'd bring up this point for consideration.

What do people think?