Unicode Emoji Icons and Symbols

I perhaps had forgotten that there is a working standard for this in the Unicode character set. This as an Emoji spec which also includes the flag data that is one of the areas I'm looking to rationalize, although it does seem that unicode may use a sequence of ASCII characters rather than a single unicode character?

Since the move in the likes of Bootstrap is to creating a font containing all of the icons, then some how it would make sence if that font actually respected the unicode character numbers? Something for me to look at, but if this is the case, then I just need to develop my own multicolour font to overlay it, so I think the starting point is probably just to establish which icons I actually need on the live websites. Actually a whole lot less than the thousands contained in various monochrome options. And now that I've switched to this line of thought, I've found a very good starting point. We are actually getting back to an older standard provided by 'Dingbats' which has been integrated into UTF-8 and the Colored Symbols section of the W3Schools site is a link towards the UTF-8 Emoji developments, and the UTF-8 Emoji Office section is a good start at many of the icons I am looking for.

The thing that is a little silly is that these processes are simply raw text so I could simply write an icon strip as a single line of text with href wrappers around each but since the string would depend on just which functions a user is allowed access to, and we ideally want a 'button' area that is the same for each letter icon. Something to play with since the text approach would scale nicely with the rest of the text as I wind the browsers scalling! Something that many sites no longer handle very well when they ahve fixed size blocks containing the text.

SO ... next step a list of actively used icons and work out how to edit a font to replace characters with my own options. I already have the Bootstrap5 Font but need to dig deeper if that follows UTF-8 character codes.