Agreed. I just discovered this add-in to select text out of images: http://projectnaptha.com/

It's currently Chrome-only unfortunately.

Hate this with my whole heart. It kills the ability to copy-paste text, or even to mark parts of it (I do that somewhat impulsively while reading; helps with focus and not losing the place you were looking at).

The images there all have ALT tags, so that should be okay. Images comprising only text is (obviously) more bandwidth-heavy, though, so that could be seen as a bit of a mistake. It's not a design mistake though, it's more of a "care about your users" mistake.

No excuse for this now we have webfonts.

Only if you don't care about anti-aliasing.

edit: ...and Kerning, text-flow, font-weight, character maps and other gripes.

Surely webfonts allow for better anti-aliasing (with sub-pixel rendering), whereas images can only guess how the sub-pixels on your monitor are arranged.

Not always. Different operating systems and browser combos have different ways of rendering fonts. I've seen fonts that look good in OSX in Firefox look poorly in Windows with Firefox (Gentium in my case).

Also these images look like they used gray scale instead of sub-pixel rendering so the differences in pixel geometry should be more or less mitigated.

I'm sure in theory it could look better as actual text for certain setups, but this probably allows them to get the best looking text in the widest amount of configurations.

Images can be rendered at the subpixel level if they are oversampled (e.g. "retina" image on a non-retina screen). Browsers just don't.

Depending on what country you live in, web fonts can be really annoying. Anything with a web font takes forever to load in China unless you are using a VPN, and either way, it's pretty much an extra round-trip you have to wait for.

I think this can be forgivable when you want to render text perfectly.

I tend to use text as images for logo fonts and banner fonts where you want to ensure the client doesn't render it in some weird way.

And sites which prevent to select text and disable the right mouse button or stuff like that. Heretics!