Worked out how to style my next and previous links, witha revolting kludge. Basically, I can’t stop WordPress outputting the dummy links, but I can make it output a non-semantic span inside then link text:

<div class="navprevious"><?php posts_nav_link('','','<span>« Previous Entries</span>') ?></div>

(I could dispense with the surrounding divs and put the class on the span, if I didn’t have future plans for the divs.)

The CSS is then

.navprevious span /* or span.navprevious if the class is on the span */
{
background: url(/punk-images/nav-previous.jpg) no-repeat;
float: left;
height: 51px;
width: 150px;
text-indent: -5000px;
cursor: hand; /* otherwise IE won't, for some fucked-up reason */
}


It breaks in IE5 as the text-indent method doesn’t work, and it vaguely offends me, though it validates: it’s not the non-semantic span that makes we weep like a weepy thing, but the empty link that WordPress spews out – and my uselessness in PHP which makes me unable to fix it.