[wtbob]

> 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.

[recursive]

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

[wongarsu]

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.

[gpvos]

Compounding mistakes doesn't make it right.

[amelius]

> 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.

[iza]

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

Was their font just poorly designed?

[amelius]

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