Icon Fonts #416
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For a while, icon sets were distributed primarily as font files on the web, hence the term icon font. While many designers and developers are shifting to SVGs instead, they clearly constitute a user case for symbolic characters.
Almost all icon fonts rely on PUA code points exclusively, although many of their symbols have obvious or at least approximate Unicode equivalents. The prime reason for this is that some of the symbols would be drawn from default system fonts otherwise, the native emoji font in particular. Many designers apparently hate that and instead accept that there is no fallback at all when the font fails to load. Amusingly, some icon fonts use the same PUA code points that Apple originally used for their emoji set before it became part of Unicode – and still supports to remain compatible with legacy content – which means that a failing icon font may result in unrelated emojis showing up. That is just one of the many problems of icon fonts.
However, as for the contents of the most popular icon fonts, much is already covered by Unicode, much is inapplicable (i.e. logos) and much of it is redundant (e.g. various weights, circled and squared variants of the same symbol without canonical semantic difference) or questionable (e.g. representable by a short sequence of existing characters). The rest should be collected here, then be compiled into a formal proposal.
After all, Font Awesome alone has probably seen more use on the web than Wingdings 1--3 and Webdings -- not to mention Zapf Dingbats -- ever have.
Specific References
Deviconsmostly logosMissing Links
Standard References
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