[TeMPOraL]

I disagree with that. Pipes seem to work in spite of plain text, being only made incredibly inefficient by it. A much better way is to send data structures through them (for which, btw. modern web is perfectly well-suited, with present JSON domination) - you can always render the data to text if you need, but you don't have to write arcane and bug-laden shotgun parsers with sed and awk because every step in UNIX polka means throwing away metadata.

Also: ditch plaintext for structured data and suddenly handling of other content becomes much, much easier, and they map perfectly to this model.