Also, in-band signalling, escape characters, magic select() timing loops to distinguish from "real" input, hackarounds for the fact that the original terminal was a separate computer and had local and remote modes and some keys never sent anything... is that metaphor REALLY still relevant?
Also check out http://www.wolfram.com/cdf/ for the more general attempt to make a dynamic document standard. I don't know how successful that's been.
Thanks for all the links.
And your first point is just verifiably wrong. If there were truly better workflow metaphors for software development, you'd think at least some of the best hackers would have discovered it and moved to it at some point in the last four (!) decades. Instead, all of the most productive developers in our subculture (almost quite literally every single one of them) work at a command line. They haven't moved elsewhere, because it won't happen, because your thesis is simply incorrect: no better metaphors have been discovered.
Now there's HTML5 and javascript, the world's most complicated terminal control language.
Yes, but the proposed replacement for UNIX consoles is a Google web browser that requires you log into Google in order to use it?? I don't think so....