[hiram112]

> But what if we flipped this? What if we first look at the position of the elements that we want to render and then create all the columns and rows from them.

What's old is new again!

This immediately brought me back to 2005 and apps like Dreamweaver or Fireworks that'd let you drag and drop your components onto a page, and underneath the covers would create some very complex (but clever) HTML table structure, complete with sliced and diced images and invisible pixels to space things correctly.

The underlying code wasn't pretty, but the sites did tend to render correctly, even in browsers like IE6.

Though back in those days, nobody had to worry about 6" phone screens, so not sure how well it'd scale (down) today.