creating css sprites is a useful and common performance-enhancing front-end development trick. instead of making a handful of http requests for dinky images, just make a call for one image and position the background accordingly with css. creating sprite sheets and the css by hand is about the most tedious and unfun thing ever though.
spriteme is a time and hair saving javascript bookmarklet that will read all the images in the css of the page you are currently viewing and automatically combine them into sprite images and css.