The solution this article references was basically a table with 1x1 cells that had their background colors set via CSS classes. I was on the team with the guy w

The solution this article references was basically a table with 1x1 cells that had their background colors set via CSS classes. I was on the team with the guy who did the hack when I was an intern. That was about three years ago. At some between then and now, Google actually went back to using a real image for it, and now it looks like it's just a CSS sprite.