As far as amount of css goes, here's what you're dealing with to achieve something similar in only CSS. 1. Button reset - to get browsers to the same startin

As far as amount of css goes, here's what you're dealing with to achieve something similar in only CSS. 1. Button reset - to get browsers to the same starting point 2. Rounded corners, Text shadows, and Gradients + vendoring 3. Background image fallback 4. Padding, Text size, line-height, etc 5. Default, Hover, and Active states for all styles That's a lot of css to write, effectively reduced to a single mixin. Of course, it's also great that you can use the bare minimum html.