37signals.com uses an hr element as a separator with a background image of three asterisks:
Another way to get a similar effect is to use a div element in the HTML together with the ::after pseudo-element selector to add plain text and some letter-spacing in the CSS:
However, alignment is not perfect because letter-spacing is also added after the last character, as can be seen thanks to the gray background and the vertical red line in the example. To fix that, a negative margin-right CSS property value can be used: