On big text (so titles, menus, etc) it's fine, and might even make things look good.
And if there's a noisy background image, it can (if done properly) help make things readable.
But for anything that's going to appear in a sig (i.e. small text, plain background), it can't look anything other than shit, and you should be ashamed with yourself for even considering it.
Oh ye of little imagination (fail)
Write your sig HTML in a normal HTML document, open it, take a screen shot and save it as a mother fucking GIF and use that for your sig. That'll show the Bougthon. :C
I might make a PHP thing on my site that returns a .bmp, that'd probably annoy him more.
I could do some interesting things if I could use JavaScript, too :C
Ok, some of those look nice. But some are a bit 'home DTP app from 1995'.
But ok, I accept that with a bit of imagination and sensitivity it can be used well.
(handshake)
See, this is why I wont play Civ with you, you fucking traitor. :@
:'D
I still have a problem with it. I mean this shit should've worked 5 years ago. But now everyone's so used to doing anything like this in photoshop. And there's no downside to doing it that way, and it's quicker and far more flexible. I kinda feel like CSS should be designed on how we use the web and make sites, not on some ideology of how we should be making the web.