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Note: @font-face and <link> really only work on Apple desktop and mobile clients.
Icon web fonts
When building a site with multiple custom icons you can save on http requests by bundling them all up in to a webfont using Thiago de Mello Bueno (Unlicensed)'s little piece of magic to combine your icons into a web font: https://github.com/madeofpeople/makesvgfont
However, you should probably never do this. The main argument of this approach was to improve performance on page load by reducing the number of requests that the browser would need to make for all the needed files. However, with the adoption of HTTP/2 browsers now can bundle a bunch of file requests in a single connection, and don't have to wait for the server to respond to each individually. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36517829/what-does-multiplexing-mean-in-http-2
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