When I write CSS, I maintain a general habit of respecting box-model discrepancies, meaning I don’t apply border, padding, or margin to an element on an axis for which I’ve specified a fixed dimension. E.g., if I’ve specified height: 50px on a div, I won’t specify border-top or border-bottom on that div. I still like to hold on to this practice even when developing a site that doesn’t officially support IE6. Oftentimes, this means I have to get tricky, and one of my go-to hacks is to use text-indent to simulate padding-left when there aren’t multiple lines of text. (I also use line-height to simulate padding-top and -bottom.) So I can cover top, bottom, and left in most cases, but not right. Now I’ve hit upon a way to simulate padding-right (again, when I only need that padding on one line of text).
I can specify direction: rtl and text-indent: Xpx at the same time in order to give some breathing room to the right of an inline element.