Sprites are a pain in the ass, we all know that. And with a recent reminder of Google's Bootstrap I am once again reminded of the horrible ways that people solve problems.
It's funny to me. We are reminded again and again that universal selectors are bad. We as UI devs are beat over the head time and time again that CSS performance is key. As shown in the wildly popular deck by Jon Rohan, [unqualified selectors][css-deck] are only second in the list of no-no's behind universal selectors. But yet we see them all over the place. Do what we say, but not as we do is the world we live in.
In Google's Bootstrap we see the following icon code, [class^="icon-"], [class*=" icon-"]
is the selector? Really?
[class^="icon-"], [class*=" icon-"] { <-- WTF?!
display: inline-block;
width: 14px;