[jermaustin1]

if the image tag is drawn dynamically then it is actually probably less bandwidth than the unicode character since the image can be cached at multiple locations including the browser.

[jrochkind1]

Less bandwidth than the 1-4 bytes of a codepoint in UTF-8? How do you figure?

[jermaustin1]

Because if it is cached, then it is 0 bytes transferred. First request could be probably a few hundred bytes, but never needed again. And once it is at a CDN, there is never another request to the server.

[cure]

.... no way.

Cache freshness checks involve a lot of headers, which take up way more bandwidth than one unicode character.

[jermaustin1]

if you care about cache freshness - you could set the cache header to 10 years and it never be an issue again.