[antod]

> And what's the point of sticking a handful of icons into a downloadable font rather than just downloading a few images?

Some reasons:

* They are scalable vector images without the download bloat and processing load of rendering them with SVG.

* Raster icons need to closely match the screen DPI or they look awful - eg Retina displays made raster icons look like blocky pixellated afterthoughts.

* They inherit colors, sizes etc from CSS the same way as their surrounding elements.