I had always thought Surface UI had the potential to kickstart a bunch of CMS opportunities. To explain that thought, it’s the pre-cursor to current Live View and their components. However, whilst many of those features made their way into current liveview, the remaining differences are that in Surface, all components look like HTML entities! So from the point of view of an end user programming stuff, there is very little gap between writing a <p> tag and a <customYoutubeComponent> tag. Also whilst the components are extremely similar to current liveview components, they are a little bit more rigid and it’s simpler to communicate between them. End result would be that you could package your plugins as these style of components much more easily and use more off the shelf HTML WYSIWYG editors, or a Wiki alike system
Anyway, it seems like interest in Surface massively dropped off with the creation of current Liveview, (which is understandable as for a developer you have everything you need in current Liveview), However, I think if you wanted to make a CMS system which is usable by non-programmers (or less IT geeky users), then there are significant wins for Surface
Just my 2p
