Pretext Could Mean A Big Change In UI/UX

This Pretext library enables some very cool stuff. Why? Websites use a system from the 1990s to determine where everything goes on screen, and every time something changes, the browser has to recalculate the positions of everything on the entire page. This makes sites slow and limits what designers can do with text.

Last week, an engineer released a free tool called Pretext that does all that layout math on its own, hundreds of times faster. It allows text to flow and reshape itself around other objects in real time, and it opens up possibilities for web design that simply weren't practical before.

Within days, developers were already building wild demos: text that reacts to physics, magazine-style layouts that rearrange in real time, and reading tools for people with dyslexia. The demos are very cool.