Unicode, web fonts, icons, and ornaments
More on Unicode glyph mapping, this time from Phil Shaw of Code Style (the site with those awesome font surveys):
The entities on this page are rendered using your standard system fonts and may not be pretty, some glyphs may be missing altogether, but the entities have meaning.
And:
Custom Web fonts should assign icon glyphs to the same standard Unicode code points so they upgrade the original content, enhance and standardise the aesthetics of the icons and retain their fundamental semantics. It is not necessary to map or hide the original characters.
So, emoji aside, when can we expect to see proper and semantically correct typographic ornaments on the web? When browsers support the CSS Fonts Module Level 3′s feature-value-name property, and when typefaces are prepared accordingly:
Some fonts may offer ornament glyphs as alternates for a wide collection of characters; however, displaying arbitrary characters (e.g., alphanumerics) as ornaments is poor practice as it distorts the semantics of the data. Font designers are encouraged to encode all ornaments (except those explicitly encoded in the Unicode Dingbats blocks, etc.) as alternates for the bullet character (U+2022) to allow authors to select the desired glyph using <feature-value-name>.
Or, when web typography services offer subsetting features that swap in alternate glyphs sensibly.