TwitterFaruk Ateş on the impracticalities of CSS as a tool for designing icons:
During the design phase, being able to tweak the pixel look and dimensions of an icon should be as simple as possible; adjusting many lines of CSS code to do this is not it, especially if you didn’t write the CSS originally. You want that icon a little bigger? Tough luck, it was created by someone else at 32 by 32 pixels, now it’s up to you to figure out how to make it all work for 36 by 36. Similarly, implementing an icon should be as simple as writing a CSS background property or adding an
<img>tag. It shouldn’t involve adding six meaningless HTML elements nor twenty lines of CSS per icon.