This is a sloppy abuse of typefaces. You can already base64 your icons in CSS, and you can already package them in sprites automatically with tools like Compass

This is a sloppy abuse of typefaces. You can already base64 your icons in CSS, and you can already package them in sprites automatically with tools like Compass. This creates more problems than it solves. IE9 will have SVG and SVG support gets better every day.