It's strange that Wayland didn't do it this way from the start given its philosophy of delegating most things to the clients. All you really need to do arbitrary scaling is tell apps "you're rendering to a MxN pixel buffer and as a hint the scaling factor of the output you'll be composited to is X.Y". After that the client can handle events in real coordinates and scale in the best way possible for its particular context. For a browser, PDF viewer or image processing app that can render at arbitrary resolutions not being able to do that is very frustrating if you want good quality and performance. Hopefully we'll be finally getting that in Wayland now.