[pornel]

I wish icon fonts used ligatures to select the right glyph, rather than meaningless codepoints (e.g. you can make font automagically replace characters "git" with the Git logo).

Otherwise these fonts end up being used in a non-accessible way (I browse with webfonts disabled and keep seeing boxes instead of images, with no fallback or a useless display:none'd fallback).

[vorillaz]

PUA characters are use as a proper way in order to render in all browsers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8052346

[pornel]

Although private use area is technically a proper way to add a custom symbol to Unicode font/text, it's not the best way from accessibility perspective.

For users who can't see the font the character will be completely meaningless. Instead of getting e.g. "Compatible with Linux!" they'll get "Compatible with reserved symbol U+E001!"

[windsurfer]

Is there an example of a font that does this anywhere?

[pornel]

Yes! https://symbolset.com/

[scrollaway]

That is incredibly cool. Thank you for linking it.

Isn't it most likely that people don't do this because they simply don't know about it?