> Finally, there have been proposals for removing the need to sprite > altogether, by allowing authors to send a bunch of resources packed > into a single compressed archive, and just addressing individual files > inside of it.
Yeah, I'd think this isn't really a problem that should be solved as part of HTML5 but rather as improvements to the protocol level. Spriting is after all just a hack around the strict 1-file-1-request nature of HTTP and not something that's really fundamental. For instance theoretically SPDY should solve this problem. Or indeed so would HTTP pipelining, if it was used more often.
