My dear front-end developers (and anyone who’s interested in the future of interfaces):
I have crawled through depths of hell to bring you, for the foreseeable years, one of the more important foundational pieces of UI engineering (if not in implementation then certainly at least in concept):
Fast, accurate and comprehensive userland text measurement algorithm in pure TypeScript, usable for laying out entire web pages without CSS, bypassing DOM measurements and reflow
Every website you’ve ever used is broken in a way you never noticed and it’s been this way for 30 years...
A Midjourney engineer finally just fixed it.
It’s called Pretext:
A tiny library that lets websites lay out text the way magazines and newspapers do, with text flowing around images, wrapping into columns, and fitting perfectly into any shape, all at 120fps.
This has been basically impossible on the web for 30 years. Every website you’ve ever used relies on the same clunky system from the 90s to figure out where text goes on screen. Pretext bypasses it entirely. 500x faster.
The demos look like they shouldn’t be possible in a browser. Go look.