How to optimize multiple repetitive images in HTML table

Question

I am generating a large HTML table, and I use images for many of the cells. For example, one column might either have a thumbs up image or a thumbs down image. If I have 300 rows and 200 of them are thumbs up, they all have

 <a href="link"><img src="http://myserver.com/thumbsup.png"></a>

so it seems like I am going to the server 200 times to get the same image and also 100 times for the thumbs down image.

Is there any way to make this more efficient? Do browsers recognize this and grab a cached value of the image?

What is the best practice when returning a large HTML table with lots of repeating images?

Answer 1

Every browser will cache the image and only download it once.