From Nicolas Gallagher: http://nicolasgallagher.com/css-image-replacement-with-pseudo-elements/
Hey Tyssen do you use image
Hey Tyssen do you use image replacement in many of your projects.
I never really got into it.
Yeah I have quite a bit in
Yeah I have quite a bit in the past. These days I quite often just use an image in the HTML with appropriate alt attribute instead; depends on whether I'm using sprites or not, cos while you can use sprites with foreground images too, it looks crap if styles are turned off.
Having said that, with support for @font-face and CSS3 increasing, I can see my need for it dropping off as time goes on.
I use #8 from this
I use #8 from this link
Phark
While ugly and mother-in-law-large, I can't consider markup with nothing inside it non-semantic. If it has content, sure. But "<span></span>" has zero meaning, and no semantics whatsoever either way. While I don't like catering too much to IE users, I don't want to give them mystery-meat-menus like Phark does.
Having the spans in from the beginning allows you to later use some script to remove them all from your HTML when you've decided IE7 usage is below your threshhold.
Even though using regex to parse HTML brings Zalgo or whatever, here it's pretty simple because there's no content in the spans.