using css sprites in Openlayers 2 instead of icons

Question

I'm using Openlayers 2 with Gmaps and a vector layer to display features with icons.

I'm using this code to set the icons on the features:

feature.style = {
            externalGraphic : iconUrl,
            graphicWidth : 30,
            graphicHeight : 20,
            fillOpacity : 1
        };

The problem is that I'm using the same icons in the site with css sprites and it would better to use them with openlayers rather than requesting the same icons from the server.

So I'm looking for a way to give each feautre a css class rather than a url for the icon.

Answer 1

There is no way to apply CSS in feature.style.

One more thing, image is only one time loaded in client machine then, it is used throughout the application. So, no worry about that.