[shadowgovt]

There was an experiment at Apple ages ago with the idea of reframing user interaction from the app to the document. OpenDoc (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc), which is remembered nowadays as an answer to Microsoft's OLE, was built around the idea that the nexus of programming could be not "What program is being run?" but instead "What data is being manipulated?" Different pieces of data would automatically invoke different code to interpret and / or modify them on-the-fly.

It was novel at the time, and we have something like that today in the form of the web browser... Though most data one fetches isn't intended for in-place editing, the convenient thing about web pages is that their hierarchical, dynamic, and self-modifying nature allow for a lot of the concepts explored in OpenDoc and OLE to be implemented within them.