Are there any differences in performance or load/caching behavior when displaying images in img tags vs divs with image backgrounds?
My example:
I have a site with many overlapping images, some of which I will need to load dynamically with javascript. One issue is that I need to anchor the images to the right of the element, so that I can do a nice wipe-to-right effect. Because of this I was using a div with background image positioned right. Couldn’t figure out how to do this with img but since divs are working for me I didn’t know if this would matter…
AFAIK, browsers cache images the same whether they’re in a DIV or an IMG. In any case, I think this one of those cases where specific performance is defined as an implementation detail internal to each rendering engine (and possibly the browsers built around them). As such, it’s both out of our control as designers/developers and subject to change from browser to browser and version to version. In other words, I wouldn’t spend too much time worrying about it.