Ample SDK is a standard-based cross-browser JavaScript UI Framework for building Rich Internet Applications. It employs XML technologies (such as XUL, SVG or HTML5) for UI layout, CSS for UI style and JavaScript with standard DOM/jQuery APIs for application logic. It equalizes browsers and brings technologies support to those missing any.
Emmet takes the snippets idea to a whole new level: you can type CSS-like expressions that can be dynamically parsed, and produce output depending on what you type in the abbreviation. Emmet is developed and optimised for web-developers whose workflow depends on HTML/XML and CSS, but can be used with programming languages too
Using image sprites is sort of a last resort after you have done as much as you can with other optimization techniques. A sprite is an image that has all of your other images inside of it, so if your sprite has 10 images, you'd be getting rid of 9 HTTP requests and speeding your site's loading time up by the time for each of those 9 requests' latency.