The other way I thought of was with pseudo elements. Not sure if you played with those yet. I watched a nettuts or css podcast on itunes I believe talking about pseudo elements where you can insert content into your DOM object before or after the element.
Cool. Probably hard without css3 but here's one approach that's kinda clever.
http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/html-css-techniques/how-to-create-diagonal-lines-with-css/
The other way I thought of was with pseudo elements. Not sure if you played with those yet. I watched a nettuts or css podcast on itunes I believe talking about pseudo elements where you can insert content into your DOM object before or after the element.