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Anyone remember the era when genuine background images were popular? Such as paper texture, greenbar paper, sparkles, and so on? Extremely geocities.

HN uses CSS background images for the vote arrows, and I've never understood why. Could it be exactly the screenreader thing?

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A lot of things are very odd about the way the HN website works, including most of the underlying JavaScript (see image object URLs for GET requests).

Not sure why you think this is odd. Visit google.com and witness image objects used for issuing tracking GET requests.

CSS sprites most likely. You can combine related smaller images into one image and then position the background image to an element so that only one portion of it is shown. This increases load speed and caching abilities since only one http request is made for the single combined background image.

the hn vote arrow is not a sprite - it's a single image, displayed rotated 180 degrees for the downvote.

https://news.ycombinator.com/grayarrow.gif

Huh, I always thought it was an alt code character...

it could be. i don't know why they use a gif instead. i usually keep HN at 125% zoom and the vote arrows look really terrible.

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