As part of the Sparkle Component Development Platform we would like to provide a facility for automatically generating Image Sprites for the theme images used by the components. The idea is that each component would provide a directory per theme of all the images used by that component for that theme. The Sprite generator would take those images and create a new Sprite Image and corresponding CSS class that provides the necessary image offset indexes for the sprite image.

Some additional requirements:

- Sprite generator must generate both the sprite image and the CSS class that specifies the image offsets.
- Sprite generator should be configurable to generate a sprite image for one component, or multiple specified components.
- Output from the sprite generator should be such that no component source code needs to be modified if the sprite image itself changes.

Ideally, if YUI provides a sprite generation tool, we could leverage that. In addition, the following resources may be useful:
- http://joshjustice.wordpress.com/2009/10/27/css-sprite-best-practices/
- http://csssprites.org/
- http://spritegen.website-performance.org/section/what-are-css-sprites
- http://ajaxian.com/archives/css-sprite-generator-released