CSS practices: negative positioning

Posted by Corey on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Corey
Published on 2011-02-06T01:07:07Z Indexed on 2011/02/06 7:33 UTC
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best-practices

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css

I'm somewhat of a novice to CSS.

Anyway, I noticed that an extremely common method used in CSS is to have negative or off-screen positioning, whether it be to hide text or preload images or what have you.

Even on SE sites, like StackOverflow and this website, have

#hlogo a { text-indent: -999999em }

set in their CSS.

So I guess I have a few questions.

is this valid CSS? or is it just a "hack"?
are there downsides to doing things this way?
why is this so common? aren't there better ways to hide content?

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