Any way to stretch background image

Question

I'm trying to create a counter similar to the one here. Which counts up by stretching/squeezing images.

But I'd rather use sprites than images for the numbers. The only problem is I cannot see a way to animate a background image stretching with javascript. I know there is the background-size css3 property, but that's not available to the jquery animate method and a bit strange.

Is there any other way I could accomplish this? Is there a way to somehow use sprites with images instead of background-images?

Answer 1

You can wrap IMG tag with DIV with overflow=hidden and move it using position property. This is not very nice solution (too much elements), but it is what you need.