It was really disturbing to me that there were so many “CSS star rating” examples out there, and every single one of them was relying on images. Surely this wasn’t impossible to do with just CSS. Turns out, it is, but luckily we have Javascript.

So how do you show a star without an image? CSS’s pseudo-element :before is the man for the job.

a.star:before {content:"\2605"}