It seems to be a very clever Unicode hack, relying on modern extended fonts which include various special characters.
Try "view source" .....
[boffin]Back in the day, there used to be animations which ran on a VT-100 or VT-220 terminal and used cursor control characters to manipulate the display, moving the cursor to overwrite characters already on the screen and draw new ones; so to "move" a character, it would be overwritten with a space and redrawn in the new position. The terminal would be connected to the computer over a serial link which limited the characters per second that could be sent, thus fixing the speed of the animation. You had to use a bit of imagination, but there was a very nice one with a Christmas tree and a train set, and one that I heard of but never saw, that got some people at my university kicked off the computers there.[/boffin]
