Ofcourse one clear solution was to call it via HTTPRequestObject but obviously that would have been an overkill for loading just an image, I came up with this solution (and i dont make any claims that no one has ever done this before) to use css only to method to show a loading image which is later replaced once the actual image has downloaded.

NOTE: This technique doesn’t work for transparent images.

The markup:

<div id="app-mod-mod1" class="mod">
<img src="slow_loading.gif">
</div>

CSS:

#app-mod-mod1 {
background: #FF url('ajaxyloader.gif') no-repeat fixed top left;
}

This will cause the image ajaxloader.gif to be loaded as the background for the div and it will get hidden behind the non transparent slow loading image.

A simple solution but works, without having to rely on javascript to updated the css classname and other cross browser incompatibility issues.