Just like the Title says, "How to use text as a background instead of an image?"
I'm making a little application, that I personally think is cool but will probably be a waste of peoples time, and am altering the button in the drop down button to an upside down triangle using this html code ▼ . I'm not talking about setting the z-index or anything just simply placing a character for the little arrow. I thought about leaving it blank but I don't think users would understand that they are supposed to use the menu if I did so. Therefore I'm going to use the upside down triangle.
My CSS for the drop-down list is set up like this
select {
border: none;
overflow: hidden;
background: no-repeat right #ffffff;
-moz-appearance: none;
-webkit-appearance: none;
text-indent: 0.01px;
text-overflow: '';
}