Absmiddle - forget or worth the torment?

As is known absmiddle is the value of the align parameter, which is supported by all browsers, but is not supported by the HTML 4.x / XHTML 1.0 specification.

The parameter itself was quite useful and convenient.

In principle, it is easy to replace through the ul-li background constructs, but ran into
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There is a menu item to which you want to add an icon.
It seems there are no problems, but the site has about 10 design options for the color gamut, and the difference in them in the menu is just the background:


The problem is solved easily with .png, but by default, of course .png does not understand IE.

If I just inserted a picture before the link and leveled it using absmiddle, then I would just have to register the class next to the picture and specify the corresponding .htc file in the class

For other cases I used a modified article of my own .

But for this case, I could not yet find a worthy (sane) replacement absmiddle.

In the habr code, I also saw this value.

Duck forget it or is it worth the torment?