@import, webkit safari and chrome

So we rolled out a big CSS overhaul on one of our main sites. Guess what... it blew up on Safari and Chrome (both use webkit).

After a bit of head scratching and searching we found that our style sheets all contained:

@charset "utf-8";

Once we removed it, the pages rendered properly. I know... not very SEO-related but we had a hard time finding the solution to this one so I wanted to post it in case anyone else was looking for it.

and I swing my beats at the playground, ya know?

I can read!

Hey everyone.

I'm reading a book right now called "Building Findable Websites" by Aarron Walter. The copywrite is 2008 so i figured it was fairly up-to-date.

I'm about halfway through and it's pretty good. A little too Apache oriented but still pretty darned good.

Except...

Repeatedly, he mentions a SEO technique for image replacement using CSS where the text is aligned left like -9999px and a background image is used on the visible portion of the screen.

Seems pretty shady to me and I'm surprised it even gets mentioned in the book. I have to ask "why" though.

Is it because the CSS isn't inline and Google won't know about the external stylesheet? I think Google's has to have figured this out and considers it a form of cloaking.

If anyone has any thoughts, I'd love to hear about it.