They do hint at, but don't examine from a technical perspective some of the strangeness associated with dingbats. For example, 'n' in an Office application was/is mapped to a picture of a skull, even though a skull has a true Unicode value. Bullets and other symbols aren't just 'clipart', they're used to structure documents, and a lot of problems in document creation/management--especially cross platform--are related to how these situations are handled. Modern emoji where :) maps to a Unicode value of a smiley face add another layer. Perhaps this wasn't the best article, but I think knowing a bit about the pre-computer history, and the early computer history is important to understanding some of the difficult problems that emerge in application development.
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It is a clipart font! This article is a bit like these linkbait things, where young people are presented with a audio cassette and a pencil
They do hint at, but don't examine from a technical perspective some of the strangeness associated with dingbats. For example, 'n' in an Office application was/is mapped to a picture of a skull, even though a skull has a true Unicode value. Bullets and other symbols aren't just 'clipart', they're used to structure documents, and a lot of problems in document creation/management--especially cross platform--are related to how these situations are handled. Modern emoji where :) maps to a Unicode value of a smiley face add another layer. Perhaps this wasn't the best article, but I think knowing a bit about the pre-computer history, and the early computer history is important to understanding some of the difficult problems that emerge in application development.
Dingbat fonts precede unicode, if I'm reading your post correctly.