As a few people said already, this does not solve the accessibility problem that comes with text-indent. Worse, it may send the wrong message: “this is new and cool, use this from now!”.
As a leader in the industry, I think you should warn people that even if this is “better” in term of performance, it is still a bad solution.
Imo, Image Replacement techniques should be evaluated against the problems they solve/address. Fwiw, I wrote something about these challenges a few years back:
http://tjkdesign.com/articles/tip.asp </shameless plug>
Gary Edwards on 18 Jun 09Some bright folks also feel the same pain and went ahead and built meta-languages and compilers that take their own version of CSS and compile it to standard CSS code. Their own CSS meta-language is thus able to have new features, like variables, mixins, operations and so on. The most notable of these right now is SASS (part of HAML). I've tried SASS and really liked it, but one thing really bothered me. I didn't like how all the syntax was different to CSS. Sure, it's not CSS anymore, it's SASS, but do we really need to change the syntax of the stuff already present in CSS - why not just expand it? I've asked a friend of mine who is much more competent at programming than me about how long it would take to code a CSS compiler that retained the original CSS syntax but added a bunch of new features. He liked the idea and so we've put together our own version of CSS together with a compiler we call LESS, which stands for Leaner CSS.
