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The rasterization of the Unicode character will be cached in the glyph cache just like the rest of the glyphs, so the GIF is not really any cheaper.

Ok, SVG, character and GIF are better than a bunch of CSS :)

You misunderstood a lot of things. Most importantly that replacing a graphic with a unicode char has something to do with CSS :-)

My original comment is a reply to the suggestion to use a CSS icon.

Well, using the :before or :after pseudo-selector and content property is a possibility.