Show HN: Emoji-awesome: Its like font-awesome but for emojis (github.com)

I don't understand. Why would you use this instead of just putting the emoji Unicode character into the page and letting the device render it?

Neat to see a CSS version of emoji, but wouldn't PNGs or otherwise be a much more efficient use of data to display emojis cross-platform, instead of a 74.5KB (unminified) CSS file being loaded to display a few emoji?

Edit: I suppose if you're using A LOT of emoji, at some point the tables turn and the CSS becomes more efficient...