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Comment by jlgreco | Hacker News Reader

Icon fonts just seem to like such a hack to me in a world where SVG exists. Is the entire idea behind using them just that IE 7/8 doesn't have SVG support? How did lack of SVG support even happen? SVG seems like something any modern browser should have had for years.

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Android also lacked SVG support until 3.2. The justification I read was that they deliberately disabled it from their webkit build to save 1MB in the compiled binary. Sad, especially since pre-ICS phones are by far the most prevalent.

Although a low Res image fallback is OK there.

I would love to use SVG, but support just isn't robust enough. Hard to deal with hover/active states too. Icon fonts are one request and easy to style with CSS color and text-shadow (even simulating glows). I just wish there was an easy way to generate a small font set from a the handful of vector elements I need for a given website (custom elements, that is, not using a service like Pictos).

You can hint a font. You can't hint an SVG.

Huh, that is unfortunate. Is hinting still important on devices with such high DPI though?

It’s not usually the high-dpi devices that you’d be adding hints for. The point is that anything that is going to replace today’s pixel-perfect bitmap graphics still has to look pixel-perfect when rendered on lower-dpi devices, which is going to remain by far the majority of visitors to most sites for a while yet.

I believe IE was trying to push the roughly equivalent VML format.

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