How to vertically center align background image with text?

Question

I am having trouble vertically aligning background image with text, without assigning constant (and hence, not automatic and reusable) values to height or line-height. I was wondering if there actually is a way to vertically center align bg image of, say and a element, with its text without assigning constant values toline-heightorheight`?

A live demo is available here: http://cssdesk.com/8Jsx2.

Here's the HTML:

<a class="">background-position: center</a>
<a class="contain">background-size: contain</a>
<a class="line-height">Constant line-height</a>

And here's the CSS:

a {
  display: block;
  margin: 10px;
  width: 200px;
  padding-left: 34px;
  font-size: 14px;  

  background: url('http://cdn1.iconfinder.com/data/icons/freeapplication/png/24x24/Thumbs%20up.png');  
  background-repeat: no-repeat;
  background-position: 5px center;

  border: 1px solid black;
}

/* I don't want to use constant line-height */
.line-height {
    line-height: 24px;
}

/* I don't want to use this, because I want my bg image's size to stay intact */
.contain {
    background-size: contain;   
}

Answer 1

Try using two words to align your background with css.

background-position: left center;

Reference: http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_background-position.asp

UPDATE:

Adding another link from comments. Grant Winney shared another site that has a much better interface for how this works.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/background-position