All window systems suck because of premature encapsulation.
The idea that software could lay out two pieces of content without any access to the semantics of that content is flawed.
We won't improve on the Macintosh until we break the window/windower encapsulation. A window manager needs to provide an API for windows to see virtual reality around them and move through it.
Can you expand on this idea or provide examples and how it solves problems with the old model? What current UI system better models the concept you are talking about? Do web pages do this better?
Sure, hypertext/wikis are used for window management quite often. Also, news feeds are quite common. Wikis are good for treelike content structures, and news feeds are good for serialized content.
wireframe resize and move is the easy answer for reducing application resize events and display server spamming. This is a core problem I've always had with enlightenment window manager, it forces opaque resize/move no matter what which murders remote display usage.
Of course when Enlightenment first came out, the opaque treatment of windows was a fairly new thing (I think BeOS was where that originated). At the time wireframe window movement was the standard -- on X, on the Mac, and on Microsoft Windows.
Windows NT had full blitting of windows while moving them instead of xored wireframe - it was the single easiest way of distinguishing between it and Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. That was in 93/94 - I don't know how it compared with Be of that era, but Wikipedia says the first developer release wasn't until late 95.
The idea that software could lay out two pieces of content without any access to the semantics of that content is flawed.
We won't improve on the Macintosh until we break the window/windower encapsulation. A window manager needs to provide an API for windows to see virtual reality around them and move through it.