Feature icon: meaning that text extraction destroys
A feature icon is the tick or crossed glyph beside a line on a grid. Where the same line is printed under every plan, the glyph carries the whole distinction and the words settle nothing. As of 2026-09-22.
| The term | Feature icon |
|---|---|
| What it names | A tick or crossed glyph beside a feature line on a grid |
| What it is not | Decoration alongside text that already says the same thing |
| Where the register uses it | One entry, whose free-tier value is read from a glyph |
Inclusion rule. Words this site uses in a narrow sense, where the ordinary sense would lead a reader to misread a cell. No vendor statement appears on this page. Order. Fixed order: what the word names, what it excludes, then where it is used here.
1A page that reads one way to a human and another to a parser
Strip the markup from a grid of this shape and every plan claims the feature. The visual distinction is entirely in a small graphic that carries no text, so a reader working from the extracted content of the page comes away with the opposite of what the page means.
This is not a hypothetical failure. It is how a register built by copying visible strings would record one entry here backwards, and how any summariser working from page text would answer a question about that vendor's free plan incorrectly.
2Why the design exists
Repeating every line under every plan makes the columns look equally substantial and lets a visitor compare positions rather than lengths. The glyph then does the work of exclusion without printing the word no fourteen times, which would make the cheapest column look punitive.
Again, a sales document doing its job. The cost is that the document has become less machine-readable exactly as more reading is done by machines, which is a structural problem for any vendor that wants its plan terms quoted accurately.
3What the register does about it
It records the value the page actually conveys and names the method: read from the icon, because the feature text is identical under all four plans. A reader who doubts the cell can open the page and look at the glyph, which is the only check available.
It also treats such a value as fragile. An icon set can change, a layout can move to a matrix, and either would require the reading to be redone rather than re-confirmed. That is what the evidence class beside the value is for.
Nothing on this page is a vendor statement; the values it helps read are on the support table, with the page and the date each one was read from. See also the paid tier column, reading a plan table. Nearby terms: negative feature line, benefit list, omission reading.