Bifalgorithm post

This engineer just solved a UI problem that was basically impossible to solve for 30 years. Called pretext. It's basically 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 120 frames per second. Something that's basically been impossible on the web for 30 years. Normally, when a website needs to know where text should be positioned, it asks the browser. The browser stops everything, recalculates every single element on the page and spits out an answer. It's slow and certain layouts completely freeze the screen, but pretext bypasses it entirely by not asking the browser at all. It uses something called a canvas and does all the map upfront, caches those numbers and after that every layout decision is instant since it's already done the map. The library already has 25,000 stars on GitHub and people are going crazy with it by building all sorts of crazy websites. Overall, this might completely change how websites are designed forever.

This engineer just solved a UI problem that was basically impossible to solve for 30 years. Called pretext. It's basically a tiny library that lets websites la…