Is there a reason not to use a custom font for the icons on the website?

Question

I was curious how Imgur showed his upvote / downvote arrows:

I assumed that they were images, but I found something that I did not expect:

A custom font that contains glyphs for the up and down arrows is mapped to the characters "o" and "x", respectively:

Is this method acceptable these days? I have never considered using a special font for something that does not semantically map to the alphabet. This approach is not even on my radar of best practices for web design.

I can imagine the reasons:

• Your site uses a standard set of icons that can be mapped to single-character codes.
• You only need to control the foreground / background color for the icons.
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