> Susan, thanks so much for stopping by and answering the question! I
> noticed a few other sites picking up on the answer already and I can
> imagine it will trickle down into the standards based community quite
> quickly too. It's good to know you have nothing to worry about if your
> intent is solid, but that even if your intent is solid and you have a
> few of these gray areas piling up it might result in something. At
> least that gives someone 'in the doghouse' something to look at if the
> cause for this might otherwise not be clear.

> Given that further reading up on this method shows that there's quite
> a few caveats when it comes to screen readers anyway (although it's a
> great solution for mobile browsers who are an increasingly important
> group to look at) I'm going to take a fresh look at a text based
> solution as well. Chris, thank you for the pointers. It does seem like
> a more viable alternative, although I'm now thinking avoiding all the
> extra spans is the most semantically correct way to go in the long run
> anyway. It's just a shame there's not more alternatives in terms of
> fonts really!

> On Jun 11, 5:39 pm, cass-hacks wrote:

> > > I don't see that Google can progammatically verify what CSS does
> > > anyway.  First it would double the crawling bandwidth needed, and
> > > secondly it would be trivial to serve the Googlebot with an innocuous
> > > CSS.

> > I don't see how it would double any bandwidth, if Google indexes the
> > pages it already has everything referenced in the page.

> > And of course it would be trivial to serve the Googlebot an innocuous
> > CSS but the same could be said for serving the bot anything innocuous
> > while serving everyone else something different.  CSS, HTML,
> > Javascript, wouldn't really matter.

> > I could think of a trivial brute-force method for determining to a
> > certain extent what CSS does, render the page and then run an OCR over
> > it.

> > I'm not saying how likely it is that Google does that but where there
> > is a trivial brute-force method thought up by a Neanderthal, like me,
> > there is usually a more elegant and efficient method possible to
> > someone who knows what they are doing, e.g. Google-heads.

> > Craig