[...]

xxxx

xxxx

xxxx  How will you handle

xxxx  this text?

xxxx

Note that users have to reach that text, for example with C-n, including both lines. Also, it needs to wrap between "handle" and "this". This ignores a bunch of other issues like "what happens if the image is sliced into more lines than will fit on the screen at once?".

This is a commonly recurring idea. In the 90's, HTML went through these concerns with a model that was mostly (Grail, Amaya, etc.) read-only, and ended up with CSS and the DOM, which are conceptually close to emacs' redisplay engine and glyph matrix.

It is certainly possible to forbid/ignore most of the complexity in favor of a simple hack, as people have mentioned already. That doesn't help figure out the issues that would be necessary to make the feature be fully (or even mostly) emacs-capable, and if that's what you want, doesn't emacs-framebuffer already give you that?

Hope that helps,

~Chad