Comment by hinkley

I did layout for a feature phone browser. WAP and mercifully XHTML-basic’s ideas of layout was simple enough that I could treat spans as a concave octagon - a rectangle with a bite out of the upper left and lower right corner. It made it at least an order of magnitude faster to paint and scroll a long document, and much simpler to think about.

In the years since I’ve used a lot of tricks for web app CSS that I’m not sure I’m smart enough to figure out. But then I’ve never thought as long and as hard about typesetting as I did at the time so who knows.