Wearing body armour to buy milk

There’s been quite a lot of talk in the web development community recently (and a couple of books) about bulletproof techniques / design. The basic idea is to adopt techniques that are as robust as possible and cater for a wide variety of situations without breaking down.

After reading a recent post, I was thinking about Image Replacement techniques in CSS and to what degree you need to take this approach – specifically in response to a technique where you add an additional empty inline element, size it to width: 100% and height: 100%, then set the background image on this element. The thinking is that with CSS on and Images disabled, you still get the text.

That’s where I start to get edgy. CSS is about the visual presentation of content. I think it’s perfectly acceptable for a design to have dependencies on images applied via CSS to work well. Images applied via the CSS background-image are all about visual presentation of content. I can’t quite figure out who would surf now, want the visual presentation of content (i.e. CSS) but not want the images. I don’t think many people are constrained on bandwidth, and they always have the option of disabling CSS to get the raw content and nothing else.

I think attempting to get the hybrid, crippled version of a design to work well is flawed. People have the option to get just the raw content, or the content with a visual design applied. Asking for a visual design without images?? Then adding extra markup to cater for it?? Sorry, don’t get it.