Matthew Buchanan (Home)

During the portion of his talk where he discussed image replacement and its impact on findability, he addressed the white elephant question that has likely occurred to most designers who have used image replacement over the past five years or so: what does Google think of CSS image replacement, anyway? But the part that surprised me is that he actually had an answer: Google’s okay with it, you won’t be penalized for using image replacement properly.

This situation arises all the time in real-world web design. Say you’ve got a navigation menu that occupies 25% of the width of the page. At small enough browser window sizes, a particularly long word in one of your menu items will either protrude messily from your menu into another part of the page, or force the menu to increase its width, possibly breaking your page layout.