CSS practices: negative positioning
- by Corey
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?