Depending on what browsers you're supports it's probably far easier to use generated content (:before, :after). Maybe combined with calc or CSS expressions.
Sure, but it's hard to get a variety of content in that way. If you have a paragraph that begins with lorem ipsum over and over again, you'll quickly notice.
While there are some situations where that makes more sense, doing that for things like paragraphs is kind of silly - you're just moving junk copy to your CSS. You either have a giant CSS file, or some rather repetitive paragraphs.
