[lobsterthief]

What you’re describing is sort of how sprites used to work. They aren’t used as much anymore.

Basically, a bunch of small images would be combined into a single image (like a grid), and then that single image would be loaded and would use background-size and background-position to display the image in a background-image. One request for a large number of small images. This isn’t used as much now that SVGs are so widely supported and can be themselves inlined.