I remember getting so deep in the weeds doing this kind of thing in responsively-resized Flash sites, a challenge similar to doing it in canvas. But what at that time I was trying to do (and what I'd really love to see now) was to reproduce runaround text the way you would have it in Quark or Pagemaker (or that newer Adobe program). Justifiable text flow within an arbitrary closed path shape, so you could have multi-column text with adjustable gutters, running with curved borders around scaling embedded graphics. My solutions for that involved a lot of setup/tear-down of invisible text fields relying on native text handling, line by line or paragraph by paragraph, then a lot of remeasuring, and then a lot of optimization to make it more performant. I wrote a similar set of code for handling text in generated PDF files.<p>As an old school print designer, I would love to see a return to a web with multi-column text on desktop, that reformatted to single column on mobile, and graphics runarounds much more complicated in shape than what a float can do. The art of typographic layout has been lost on the web, because those things are <i>hard</i>. An OS general-purpose engine that could handle layouts like that in any screen size, on Canvas or using absolute positioned divs or generating PDFs, would go a long way toward restoring artistic originality in the "layouting" of online publications.