Re: Data icons via CSS: no eye candy locked into sources.
Reply #4 –
@Spuds Opera could already do that back in '02/'03 (well, excluding the web fonts and some of the newer selectors). Took the other browsers a while to catch up, but I think the whole shebang (generated content, selectors & web fonts) has been pretty mainstream since at least '09/'10-ish.
That being said, classnames are much faster and might be useful for other purposes, so there's really nothing particularly wrong with the current approach as outlined by @emanuele besides that e.g. .icon and .icon-menu smell redundant. After all, you've already got #main_menu .icon or whatever, so yeah… heck, even just #main_menu li might do without any classnames depending on the specifics.
On the CSS side you'd have
.icon, .icon-big, .icon-lalala {shared junk}
.icon-big {non-shared junk}
But that's nitpicking and partially a matter of personal taste anyway.