Comment Re:Abused but Necessary (Score 1) 378
I think it has its uses as a replacement for Dynamic fonts.
Dynamic fonts was mostly useful for Indic and other complex scripts at a time when Unicode was still nascent and there were still challenges in getting Indic and other scripts rendered properly. Publishing houses (all of them earlier and most of them now) use an ASCII based font and push dynamic fonts to IE users while expecting other browser users to download them. While Unicode should make this moot, slow adaption of Unicode by publishers and users and the fact that by default, most Windows XP installs did not come with Indic pre-configured means there is still market for this hack. Publishers could push either their ASCII hack font or Unicode font to users this way at least until there is more mainstream adoption of Unicode and in the process help non-technical people, especially those not using IE, access to content with less issues.