The PDF 1.6 specification includes section 10.10.6 Open Prepress Interface (OPI), describing OPI dictionaries that can be associated with an image proxy, including information such as a filename field equivalent to the PostScript %ALDImageFilename comment. I guess you would need some CSS properties to specify these for a given image, something like this:
img.proxy {
prince-pdf-opi-filename: "/path/to/big/image";
prince-pdf-opi-id: "MyBigImage";
...
}
However, there are a lot of other fields, such as Position, CropRect, Tint, Overprint, etc. It's probably not practical to define CSS properties for all of these, so perhaps it would be better to have a single property that allows you to specify multiple values:
img.proxy {
prince-pdf-opi: F "filename" ID "id" CropRect "0 0 400 200" ...
}
Does this look like the sort of interface that you would need?