In 2002, Mark Newhouse published the article “Taming Lists”, a very interesting piece in which he explained how to create custom list markers using pseudo-elements. Almost a decade later, Nicolas Gallagher came up with the technique pseudo background-crop which uses pseudo-elements with a sprite. Today, on the shoulders of giants, we’ll try to push the envelope. We’ll discuss how you can style elements with no extra markup and using a bidi-friendly high-contrast proof CSS sprite technique. The technique will work in Internet Explorer 6/7 as well.