That is really cool. I had never thought about (ab)using SVG in that way.

SVG is such an underappreciated technology that is in every browser. Why do icon fonts exist when you could just use SVGs just like you do PNGs and JPEGs? You can even inline them in your HTML so there isn't an additional HTTP request if you want.

Wouldn't it probably be one request per icon instead of just one request for a while font?

Not necessarily. You can have a single SVG file with multiple 'defs' that you can reference around the page, or just embed the SVG code in the HTML itself (via a templating language) if you're not using too many.

Great idea, I love 'thinking outside the box' solutions, but doesn't seem to work on Firefox mobile. (Perhaps it's just me.)