In the case of the sprite, the "hotspot" coordinates are also the drawing origin of the sprite image.
Note that the primary difference between the "icon" or "cursor" or "sprite" bitmapped image type and the more customary "web graphic" types is that the icon/cursor/sprite images are mapped onto arbitrary backgrounds using transparency and simple bit-wise logic operations.
These pixmap graphics also often rely on reduced color-counts relative to the colorspace available under e.g. current X-Windows desktops...