Great, great article, you are a hero! I had never thought of using sprite maps without background image.

I thought I would share this because I had a unique problem that was solved by this issue. I was using a webkit CSS feature called -webkit-print-color-adjust: exact; which allows background-images and color to be printed in spite of the default print behavior which is to ignore them

After putting this app together, I ran into this immeasurably painful issue where the background-image, when printed, would scale and stretch to a huge, out of place image. I was using a sprite map – tried both PNG and SVG images. I couldn’t use backround-size because of I wanted to use only a portion of the sprite for the specific CSS class. Ultimately, I could not find a solution to this scaling issue.

So, my CSS background image would scale uncontrollably when I would print. Using an IMG-tag based image map with margins instead allowed me to solve this printing background-image scaling and stretching issue.

Again, thanks for the brilliant idea!