One of the reasons that X has copious nested windows is that X was designed with a particular model of writing X programs in mind, and that model made everything into a (nested) window. Seriously, everything. In an old fashioned X application, windows are everywhere. Buttons are windows (or several windows if they’re radio buttons or the like), text areas are windows, menu entries are each a window of their own within the window that is the menu, visible containers of things are windows (with more windows nested inside them), and so on.

Source: Chris’s Wiki :: blog/unix/XWindowsAllTheWayDown