[Animats]

It was very hard for the CAD and animation industries to figure out a good UI for editing geometry. It took about two decades. But it's now a solved problem. The web layout industry should look at that technology, which comes from an industry that has to deal with hard geometry problems.

[dredmorbius]

One of the advantages of architectural design is that few building footprints vary greatly from instance to instance, or for the same instance, particularly over the course of a fraction of a second or so.

Or ... when that's happening, much more exciting things are going on.

I'm wondering just how complicated text really needs to be, and what the benefits of walking well outside gridded layout is.

A text is essentially a linear strand, wrapped. Some of those strands may present as sub-texts (tables, lists, call-outs, etc.), but you still have the concept of "how do I present a sequence of letters, arranged by words, sentences, paragraphs, etc., into some folded space?"

We've gone from tablets, rock walls, scrolls, etc., to generally codices (printed) or ... well, sort of a scroll-page hybrid for Web.

That said, interesting points, and I plan on digging into this a bit further.

[detritus]

i believe that web markup in any useful productive sense should be usefully creatable and editable by hand, outwith a graphical interface.