On the kinda sites I'm talking about, it'd be fucked altogether, yeah, we're not really talking about headers as such. Just very 'rich' websites.

But the standard approach of people who know what they're doing is to use the image as a background image and have the text there, but invisible. That way you're not fucking over screen readers etc..

I think it's about the nature of companies. If they're a tech-based comapny (or small) they tend to understand stuff better (or can be made to).

Aye. We (pH Group) are a relatively small company, although now we're part of Experian so maybe the future won't be so rosy.

Flash does quite a bit of the stuff you seem to want all ready, including text shadows. I hate Flash for a lot of reasons. If you work within the constraints of css, you can get a pretty rich website without needing to photoshop everything in sight. If you must photoshop well, there's photoshop. There's a few bitmap-handling tricks I'd like to see added to css though, including transparency, 8-bit alpha channel support, rotation etc..

Rotation is there, at least in some browsers - check "transform" command.