[mrled]

Oh man, you're right, I didn't realize they worked this way. This basically means there is no compromise at all, I'm going to update the post. Thanks!

[panstromek]

Well, there's still a compromise to be fair. It's defintely more work to manage these sprites and it's especially annoying when there's more than one state. I think it's possible to write some tool to automate it, but I haven't found one.

[douglee650]

There are preprocessors that will do this. Conceptually, we would:

  include sprite-1.snippet
  include sprite-2.snippet

and it would write the defs into the page. Then later in the page, `<use>` the defs you included.