Rotating text by generating custom font files with pre-rotated characters and putting each character in a separate absolutely positioned div element is more "practical" than CSS transforms? I find that difficult to believe.
IE (including IE6) supports transforms, as you point out yourself. Of course they don't do it in a standards-compliant way, but that's true for their custom font support also. What problems did you run into?
Performance issues, among others. IE's DXImageTransform, as the name suggests, renders an html element to an image and then transforms that entire image.
The VML APIs that've been in IE forever are all pretty damn fast individually, but displaying the results slows the rendering down significantly. It's like how straightforward PHP is damn fast as a templating system, but absurdly slow for implementing a high-level templating system in.
Besides, text selection wouldn't work.
Have y'all managed to avoid implementing a GDocs-style system for hiding text underneath bitmaps for selection?
Rendering an HTML element to an image isn't inherently slow; Safari does the same to hardware accelerate CSS animations via Core Animation and it's quite fast there. Of course, it's entirely possible IE's implementation is terrible.
I'm curious about the other issues you had as well.
I think CSS is the easy way. CSS rotation of text looks just fine in any IE and in Chrome, but I'm afraid that Firefox will have to come up with a new text rendering engine to get the text readable when rotated. It looks terrible in Firefox.
