Message status icons in strict XHTML

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

I'm working on integration of JForum in an external host. All markup emitted is tagged as XHTML strict, and this is non-trivial to change. Most things seem to work fine, though, but one thing that doesn't is the list of icons (New messages, No new messages, Announce etc...) at the bottom of a forum. The solution for getting the images from CSS seems to create a mess of it, where each icon is tiled and the "alt" text written out. This is the behavior I get in Firefox, in IE I just get some extra borders...

Has anyone else seen this? It could be some other factor of the external hosting or my manual template editing, but when comparing the forums here with the ones I host in the Firefox DOM inspector, I see no significant changes, except for the difference in the Page info, where the parsing modes differ between "Tolerant" and "Strict".
[originally posted on jforum.net by cnettel]

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

That's why I don't add the strict headers to JForum, as there are some aspects of html and css that need to be done differently, and I personally don't want to spent a lot of time debugging html stuff.

You may replace the css version of images by hardcoding the paths - that was the initial approach we used.

Rafael
[originally posted on jforum.net by Rafael Steil]