One of YSlow's measurables is to use cookie-free domains to serve static files.

  
"When the browser requests a static
  image and sends cookies with the
  request, the server ignores the
  cookies. These cookies are unnecessary
  network traffic. To workaround this
  problem, make sure that static
  components are requested with
  cookie-free requests by creating a
  subdomain and hosting them there." --
  Yahoo YSlow

I interpret this to mean that I could experience performance gains if I move www.example.com/images to static.example.com/images.

Although this is easy to do, I would lose the handy ability within my content management system (Joomla/WordPress) to easily reference and link to these images.

Is it possible to use .htaccess to redirect all requests for a particular folder on www.example.com to a folder on static.example.com instead? Would this method also fool the CMS into thinking the images were located in the default locations on its own domain?