You know those status bars in dwm and similar window managers? Those are usually generated from a pipeline outputting a line every few seconds or so.

To make it display something as trivial as the frequency of your CPU, the network speed, etc, you have to randomly parse some ad-hoc, program-dependent format that may be locale-dependent! If these could speak a proper language, one could just take the value of this field/object/element and be done with it.