> They are scalable, they load a single time, and contain nearly every iconic type of symbol you could want in a UI.

An SVG is scalable, cacheable and can contain any vector art you could wish for. And it doesn't use characters to represent images.

Are you aware of any of the recent actions of the Unicode consortium? You can start here. http://www.unicode.org/emoji/charts/emoji-released.html

Emoji are almost exclusively used embedded in regular text. Emoji work similar to our regular alphabet, only that they are typically used to express emotions and abstract concepts that are harder to express in regular words. Since we have regular text and emojis used in the same context (and often as part of the same sentence) it makes sense for unicode to support both.

This is fundamentally different from icon fonts. twitter icon or mailbox icon are not meant to be used inside of text, so they have no business in fonts.

Compounding mistakes doesn't make it right.

> An SVG is scalable

But fonts have hinting, so they look nice at low sizes and low resolutions. This is something that SVG is still missing.

GitHub recently switched to SVG and claimed the opposite: https://github.com/blog/2112-delivering-octicons-with-svg

Was their font just poorly designed?

That could be the case. Also, it may depend on the particular browser they used.

Web Fonts abuse HTML: they take text and give it a different meaning. The letter 'a' does not indicate a daisy with pink petals; it is the letter 'a,' the English word 'a' and so forth.

Think for a moment about what Web Font users do: sprinkle garbage throughout their pages; run JavaScript to dynamically load stuff (and possible destroy the privacy and/or security of the client); dynamically update the page — all when a simple, semantic image could have done the trick.

It's kinda insane, like rendering a page by loading JavaScript to slowly append characters to the DOM.

That's just inaccurate – AFAIK all modern icon fonts make use of the Unicode PUA, which is specifically intended for this sort of application. The characters used have no semantic meaning beyond what the application, including its fonts, intend.

> That's just inaccurate – AFAIK all modern icon fonts make use of the Unicode PUA, which is specifically intended for this sort of application.

Why, then, does one see all sorts of strange characters on web pages which use icon fonts?

Problem is we should be using ligatures not single letters. Guilty of the error as well. But it can be done e.g. http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articles/your-logo-as-a-web-fo...