Whats the purpose of using one image sprite in Google music website images

I have seen that google music is using one image for all the small images used in google Music website

http://music.google.com/music/sprites.png开发者_如何学编程

i want to know whats the advantage of it. It would be very difficult to mark the position coordinates of small images

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It reduces the number of HTTP requests that the client has to make to the server. Generally this speeds load time.

Yahoo provides a good set of guidelines for decreasing the load time of your web page. This is part of their first rule.

Setting up all of the indexes for the locations is time consuming, but it only has to be done once by the developer and then every single page load requires less HTTP requests. Specifically, in this case, 1 request rather than several dozen for all of the little images.