Load product images as background-image is faster than conventional?

[urbanzen]

Hello Everyone. I'm about to post a company name here so I'm not sure if it's against the TOS or not, but it's a general inquiry on why they would do this.

In the SmartBargains website, all their images dealing with products are done via background image loads. The strange thing is that the background images loads up lightning fast! Like as soon as the product information and price comes up, it appears alongside it.

For example the first block loads up 0.5 seconds with it's image, then the next one loads up (name price image) and etc.

How did they do this, and why should they do this instead of using the conventional <img />?

[urbanzen]

Sorry I forgot to say, that you need to go to their categories, and drive down to any subcategory to see their listings.

[edit]....sorry. I just saw the "owner edit" after I made the 2nd post..

[chambone]

I don't think it matters much, if at all. How did they do this? They specify image locations in embedded styles. Personally I think it's bogus markup, but hey..

[urbanzen]

What they do is to have <span> tags with Id in them, and probably render them using Ajax but I'm not sure.

Pretty clever though, but because backgrounds loads last, I was wondering why in this instance they prefer to use backgrounds, then use serverside to render them out first.