It’s amazing how the web “best practices” become obsolete in a matter of months. The guys at Duris.ru seem to confirm that. What they have at their website for everyone to test and hopefully adopt is a new method of using background images.

The new method allows easy updating of the images, fewer http requests, enables scaling for the background images and a lot more:

The description of this method by the authors or…

Why is it better then CSS sprites?

• allows you to apply any corrections to your make-up painlessly
• allows you to minimize number of requests for design-related data that is used on the webpage
• uses text (non graphic) format of image data presentation
• allows you to create fully semantic HTML/CSS-code (w/o any non-semantic constructions for design purposes)
• solves all problems with scaling for background images
• combines images of different types and axes of repetition.

The method works great with IE6/7/8 except (of course) IE7 on Vista with non supported mhtml.

They’ve got examples page and a FAQ section

Head over there and have taste of new best pratices ’till they last