> You've hit the nail on the head with this comment. It seems that almost > all layout systems spend 99% of their smarts laying out blocks of > graphic information *and* trying to figure out how to make text be > still "self-layingout". And I do mean all: from TeX, lout, all the > way to HTML/CSS.
i think there's hope. boxes-n-glue is simple enough. within a text box, layout could be the same as today. gluing boxes together is fairly straightforward. (just steal knuth's algorithms.) i think a good bit of τεχ's complexity is in that last smidge of layout doctoring and the fact that everything needs to fit on a page. if you get rid of kerning, hyphenation, hbadness, vbadness, etc. by using the current text layout algorithm, it might just be reasonable. - erik
