I love Google Web Fonts. They’ve really pretty-ed up the internet. On the other hand, I don’t like how much they slow down load times. Here’s a little trick to speed them up a tiny bit.
TL;DR: No. Load up that style.css with all the images you want! They won’t be downloaded unless they are needed. I was always under the impression that browsers would parse through a style sheet and immediately start downloading all the images
Cross-Browser Compatibility can be almost always is a nightmare. Something that looks amazing in Chrome version 22 might look completely different in Firefox 3.5 (or IE7). To make things even more fun (sarcasm), making a minor CSS change to correct