I remember getting so deep in the weeds doing this kind of thing in responsively-resized Flash sites, a challenge similar to doing it in canvas. But what at that time I was trying to do (and what I'd really love to see now) was to reproduce runaround text the way you would have it in Quark or Pagemaker (or that newer Adobe program). Justifiable text flow within an arbitrary closed path shape, so you could have multi-column text with adjustable gutters, running with curved borders around scaling embedded graphics. My solutions for that involved a lot of setup/tear-down of invisible text fields relying on native text handling, line by line or paragraph by paragraph, then a lot of remeasuring, and then a lot of optimization to make it more performant. I wrote a similar set of code for handling text in generated PDF files.
As an old school print designer, I would love to see a return to a web with multi-column text on desktop, that reformatted to single column on mobile, and graphics runarounds much more complicated in shape than what a float can do. The art of typographic layout has been lost on the web, because those things are hard. An OS general-purpose engine that could handle layouts like that in any screen size, on Canvas or using absolute positioned divs or generating PDFs, would go a long way toward restoring artistic originality in the "layouting" of online publications.
> As an old school print designer, I would love to see a return to a web with multi-column text on desktop, that reformatted to single column on mobile, and graphics runarounds much more complicated in shape than what a float can do.
this has been possible for quite some time with CSS columns:
Without sarcasm, that's great. Now what is there to prevent me from scrolling up and down on a 16:9 display to read the left column of a 10k letter text and then the right column?
I see it has "length" and "min/max-content" properties... even if there are sufficiently many <p>aragraphs (for vertical splitting), inevitably enough paragraphs will be single column due short length. So it becomes a mix and match between "here we were able to split into columns, and here you get a full width single column text flow"?
PS: Oh and don't get me on the CSS used to determine mobile layouts. My 9:16 4K often enough triggers that degraded experience of mobile.
> Now what is there to prevent me from scrolling up and down on a 16:9 display to read the left column of a 10k letter text and then the right column?
if the author decided on exactly 2 columns then, well, that's not a limitation of the tech. css columns support dynamic columns, but obviously the author would then need to specify a max height.
> My 9:16 4K often enough triggers that degraded experience of mobile.
again, sounds like incompetent authorship rather than a tech limitation.
As an old school print designer, I would love to see a return to a web with multi-column text on desktop, that reformatted to single column on mobile, and graphics runarounds much more complicated in shape than what a float can do. The art of typographic layout has been lost on the web, because those things are hard. An OS general-purpose engine that could handle layouts like that in any screen size, on Canvas or using absolute positioned divs or generating PDFs, would go a long way toward restoring artistic originality in the "layouting" of online publications.