Oh, no question there is abuse going on here - this thought experiment is really reaching and extending beyond a certain horizon, which may or may not be idiotic. ;)
Perhaps you're familiar with the wonderful and super-crazy TempleOS? There are some great things about the way the UI is expressed there ..
>Some things are simply more easily done outside of the standard glyphs we use for words. I don't expect this will ever change. And I shudder at all of the complexity added to our glyph systems to support efforts at making "one true language" that can do everything.
Certainly a valid concern, and I acknowledge your conservatism, but I think you might want to look at the cyclomatic complexity of the work required to splash a modern GUI up on the screen, and compare it with the cyclomatic complexity required to render a human-readable string of glyphs. There is a lot of opportunity to optimise these processes - and I would wager that having a font full of glyphs required to construct a UI paradigm, having those primitive elements processed by the OS in a simple way, and giving those elements to the end-user (who admittedly would need to learn something new for it to be productive), may indeed produced a "simpler" interaction method for future users. Yes, there is a certain fallacy to the "one true language" approach - but if you pay careful attention, you'll notice that the OS's of most common use in the last 10 years are on that road, anyway.
Break this out of the box a little, lets move from glyph/grapheme/font territory - what if the entire OS was instead expressed with SVG files? I think this is a viable thought experiment, personally.
Most modern gui toolkits bother me in ways that I can't adequately express. All the more so because most fallback to thinking CSS is the answer. Often completely ignoring what you can easily accomplish if you are willing to use absolute positioning, oddly enough!
Seriously, I don't think CSS is the worst answer. However, trying to get everything to work with some default flow behavior is borderline insanity. More, it is completely unnecessary. My favorite example lately has been http://taeric.github.io/cube-permutations-1.html for how you can layout using absolute positioning perfectly fine. (I similarly did sudoku with minimal effort using similar markup.)
But the worst sin is the sheer instability of what we are building as our foundation. The box and glue methods of TeX might not be the most intuitive method, nor the most powerful. However, it is nice that they have been stable. And not just in the "doesn't crash" sense of the word. In the, "I would feel comfortable building on top of it" sense.
So, let me be clear that I'm skeptical, but I would be delighted to be proved wrong.
I've been into GUI's and so on since before the birth of the web, and I've always had this deep discomfort with where we have arrived here and now, today. The Web and its UI is such a disastrous, convoluted mess of abstractions and significance and conceptual complexity - yet, it works "well enough" that a majority of the world can deal with it.
But this doesn't mean we can't think outside the box. Yes, I concur - TeX's box and glue is another kettle of fish - but then so too are things like Box2D's physics forces and contact mechanisms, which I personally believe, were it integrated into a forward-thinking GUI framework, would open the doors to very interesting and versatile interfaces - as has been demonstrated by its application towards making those most intuitive interfaces of all times, games. I would love to be able to say "[ the context of this independent element has a gravity of -1. ]", and then watch as my sentence floats away to the top of the screen, to function as a daily "Todo list" which, once I press the '.' period at the end of the ToDo item, then sets the gravity to 1, and the whole thing lands at the bottom of the screen, away from my attention. There are many abstractions like this out there which could be applied to human/computer interaction - we've selected a set of words, symbols, concepts that are granted us by the designers of modern OS's, but I truly believe that the effort of producing interaction symbology is far, far from where it could be. As do many other people of course (http://worrydream.com) .. there seems to be a plethora of views about this. Almost as many views, as symbols in the world there are to be read ...
Perhaps you're familiar with the wonderful and super-crazy TempleOS? There are some great things about the way the UI is expressed there ..
>Some things are simply more easily done outside of the standard glyphs we use for words. I don't expect this will ever change. And I shudder at all of the complexity added to our glyph systems to support efforts at making "one true language" that can do everything.
Certainly a valid concern, and I acknowledge your conservatism, but I think you might want to look at the cyclomatic complexity of the work required to splash a modern GUI up on the screen, and compare it with the cyclomatic complexity required to render a human-readable string of glyphs. There is a lot of opportunity to optimise these processes - and I would wager that having a font full of glyphs required to construct a UI paradigm, having those primitive elements processed by the OS in a simple way, and giving those elements to the end-user (who admittedly would need to learn something new for it to be productive), may indeed produced a "simpler" interaction method for future users. Yes, there is a certain fallacy to the "one true language" approach - but if you pay careful attention, you'll notice that the OS's of most common use in the last 10 years are on that road, anyway.
Break this out of the box a little, lets move from glyph/grapheme/font territory - what if the entire OS was instead expressed with SVG files? I think this is a viable thought experiment, personally.