[shabble]

There was a project mentioned on HN fairly recently (~weeks ago) about an extended pipe system, using JSON and a bunch of common schemas, as I recall.

Both http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit and http://blogs.perl.org/users/rocco_caputo/2011/05/apppipefilt... seem to fit what I was thinking of, but I'm sure there was something else.

Nice ideas, but the inertia of existing unix tools is going to be hard to overcome, and a system isn't much use until all your common tools support it (or at least don't break it).