It's a pity the syntax is so horrendous. After working on native mobile apps with real path support this is not appealing at all.

This is just a bit of experimentation. Not something with any significant practical benefit.

You just have to look at the code behind this - http://nicolasgallagher.com/pure-css-gui-icons/demo/ - for confirmation that this is not a viable solution for complex shape creation.

Wow, offtopic, but you have a beautiful site.

I'm in the midst of reading Robert Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style and it's really motivating me to design my blog in a lot neater, cleaner, typographically-aware style. I think you've really nailed that. If you haven't read that book yet, I highly recommend it; I think you'd appreciate it.

Yeah I was mainly responding to the parent which suggested that these techniques are going to be relevant for UI designers.

You're absolutely right, visual designers really do need to learn CSS.

But not for this. These examples are as relevant to real-world CSS design as writing a Reddit clone in three lines of Clojure is to real-world web development.