Responsive text and code

Many years ago, I put together a quick proposal of what I called “responsive text” for social proof: I think you get the idea – instead of dumb truncation, the underlying code could prepare a few strings conveying the information with different levels of specificity, and then the UI could choose the longest one that could still fit. This idea can apply in a few places. Here, in Figma, one of the menus switches to a more “compact” string that uses four-letter abbreviations and skips “weight” altogether – but only when there isn’t room for a verbose treatment. You can also compare it with the original, naïve truncation: Recently, I spotted Jake Archibald, developer working on Firefox, propose something in a similar vein – responsive code: I think this is a lot more clever and a lot more important. Mobile phones are everywhere. Wrapping code like regular text without understanding it makes it basically impenetrable, but preserving long lines and introducing horizontal scrolling is also…