[thelist] In Defense of Fahrner Image Replacement

[Peter-Paul Koch]

> > Why spooky?
>
>because they are talking about replacing perfectly good text with images
>
>something about that makes me uneasy
>
>i mean, what's wrong with both?

Yes, thanks, that was the fallacy I was looking for. Image + text = no 
problem, so why bother?

It's design for design's sake. I thought we'd beaten this particular bugbear 
years ago.

More in general, most CSS hacks I see are making things complicated and 
in-crowdy for sake of making them complicated and in-crowdy. "You don't know 
Usher's Unadulterated Asterisk Semi-Replacement Hack? Wow, like, what are 
you doing in web developer's land?"

>and the example in that article, that
>cutesy little recipe card, well, if that's the direction they're going, i'm
>going to want to turn the image off and see the text, and how many
>"ordinary" users are going to know how?

Even worse, if you turn off the images you don't see the text either because 
it's display: none'd.

> > Personally I feel this quest for CSS-hacks or not-quite-hacks has gone 
>too
> > far now (though the image replacement trick is neater than most)
>
>yeah, i felt the same way the first time i saw the voice family hack, i was
>thinking that it was a little bit like running red lights in the middle of
>the night, one o' these days you're gonna get caught

One day the browser bugs that allow the hack will go away, but the browser 
bugs the hack is supposed to solve don't, or vice versa. Then what's left? 
Ugly code that doesn't work and that no one understands.

Thanks for yet again giving me inspiration for the "Keep CSS simple" column 
that I'll be getting around to write any day now.

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ppk, freelance web developer
Interaction, copywriting, JavaScript, integration
http://www.xs4all.nl/~ppk/
Column "Keep it Simple": http://www.digital-web.com/columns/keepitsimple/
New: Browser Wars II: The Saga Continues
http://evolt.org/article/rdf/25/60181/
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