I think aligning to decimal point just amuses the crap out of me because "receipt" is a very common document type that you would expect to see on the web. No?

I think aligning to decimal point just amuses the crap out of me because "receipt" is a very common document type that you would expect to see on the web. No? At least in something like GTK and Qt you would be more than justified in just punting on the semantics of the receipt and formatting a fixed width set of numbers to call it a day? In HTML, doing that feels extra wrong. (But, indeed, you can do the same "fixed width" with non collapsed whitespace, even in HTML.) And it isn't like this isn't a somewhat solved thing in long existing layout engines. Aligning to variables and such is very common in math texts. And largely not doable in HTML. Reflow is one that always strikes me as largely misguided. No amount of reflow will make most websites look good on a gigantic monitor. Same as no amount of reflow will make most documents handle someone's name that is actually a novel. It just doesn't make sense, for many reasons. And yet we will put forth herculean efforts to maintain "reflow" based on content in so many places.