Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Text in graphics

It didn’t take long for designers (this author included) to start replacing ugly browser text with text set in an inline graphic. For a while, it was not uncommon to run across sites with all every last word of their “content” sunk into a graphic. While this may achieve the short-term goal of preserving the intended font design, it comes at a steep cost. Not only does it increase the file size of the page, but the content is essentially removed from the document. Alternative text (using the alt attribute) helps, but does not solve the problem.