IE Performance Tip: avoid repeating tags

FTA:

So, using the CSS to style an entry with an appropriate image, instead of using an image tag gives us a 67% speed increase in IE's rendering time on the initial download, and a 77% increase in rendering time on refresh.

Reduced time to render from 16.77 seconds to 5.6 seconds

and reduced time to reload from 24.5 seconds to 5.6 seconds 

Pretty impressive and it costs zippy...

Read the full article:

http://www.webperformance.com/load_testing/blog/2011/01/ie-performance-tip-avoid-repeating-img-tags/