3 ms·

> the idea is not to remove the traditional hierarchical file system from the low level, but rather to remove trace of it from nearly all human interaction. Bu

by zrm 8y ago

> the idea is not to remove the traditional hierarchical file system from the low level, but rather to remove trace of it from nearly all human interaction. But that's the issue. You can make it easier to use tags, you can make it so that they are what most people use most of the time, but you still want everything to be able to use paths, in a way which is still as universal and intuitive as possible, so that it still works properly everywhere when you do have a good reason to use them instead. > Consider instead the epub format. It too is one or more html files with images, css, etc. However unlike the traditional local static copy of a web page, all of those files are zipped together and stored as a single file (an epub is a glorified zip file with a special file extension. You can extract them with `unzip`.) Here's something even better -- what macOS does with applications. You look in /Applications and see a bunch of programs. Those are really directories with the application's files in them, whose names are the names you see but with a .app extension. If you click on one, you don't see what's in the directory, you cause the application to open. But you still can see what's in there, by using the actual path with anything that accepts file paths, and that is still useful. Because sometimes there is a .plist file in there or something else you want to modify, or you just want to see what's really there. This is better than a zip file because it's still native. You get the behavior you want, but if you want to see or modify what's in there, you don't need to use a special program or go through the extra steps to unzip the file and zip it again, you just access it using the real path. Windows at one point did somewhat the opposite and exposed the contents of .zip files as folders, but that doesn't seem to work as well, e.g. modifications are not permitted or are inefficient or have other issues because you have to repack the whole file with every write.

darkpuma 8y ago
The way MacOS handles Applications is indeed humanist, but there is nothing about that user interface that intrinsically relies on strict file hierarchies. Furthermore, the implementation of it isn't generalized. The substance of what I think you're getting at is record-oriented files systems, which I consider orthogonal to the matter of tagging vs strict hierarchies. With a record-oriented files system, files are no longer seen by the OS as mere byte streams, but actually have meaningful structure. It needn't be implemented carelessly like Windows with it's zip support in Explorer. It's a very compelling idea, but as I said, orthogonal to the matter of hierarchies or tagging. Say for instance you want to edit the .plist file of Blender.app. Where is Blender.app? Probably at /Applications/Blender.app but maybe it's in /Users/zrm/Applications/Blender.app To dive into that file/directory, you must first find it. How the user is meant to find it is the question that needs to be addressed. That's a simple example of course because there are only two likely locations for it (and the later is unlikely), the file/directory you're looking for has a name you remember off the top of your head, and because either of those directories probably has no more than a few hundred entries (probably a fraction of that.) In this case the user of a hierarchical system doesn't run into much trouble because the situation is virtually ideal, but even so a tagging system would have simplified the query. The further you get from ideal circumstances, the larger the gap between tag systems and hierarchical systems grows. Additional thoughts on record oriented file systems: one example is Files-11 from VMS. An interesting property of Files-11 is that it allows files and directories to have multiple parent directories, which is similar to Unix's hard links except that directories, not only files, are allowed to have multiple parents. This gives the system the same expressive power of tags (consider each full path a file can be found at to be a tag on that file.) This allows all of your books to simultaneously be in /Books/ while still allowing you to have them in other locations like /School/cs/cs101/textbook.pdf However a system capable of expressing these relationships is the easy part. The important part is giving the human users a clean user experience, allowing them to take full advantage of the power of such a system without requiring them to manually create and maintain a web of nested links.

by zrm 8y ago

darkpuma 8y ago

The way MacOS handles Applications is indeed humanist, but there is nothing about that user interface that intrinsically relies on strict file hierarchies. Furthermore, the implementation of it isn't generalized. The substance of what I think you're getting at is record-oriented files systems, which I consider orthogonal to the matter of tagging vs strict hierarchies. With a record-oriented files system, files are no longer seen by the OS as mere byte streams, but actually have meaningful structure. It needn't be implemented carelessly like Windows with it's zip support in Explorer. It's a very compelling idea, but as I said, orthogonal to the matter of hierarchies or tagging. Say for instance you want to edit the .plist file of Blender.app. Where is Blender.app? Probably at /Applications/Blender.app but maybe it's in /Users/zrm/Applications/Blender.app To dive into that file/directory, you must first find it. How the user is meant to find it is the question that needs to be addressed. That's a simple example of course because there are only two likely locations for it (and the later is unlikely), the file/directory you're looking for has a name you remember off the top of your head, and because either of those directories probably has no more than a few hundred entries (probably a fraction of that.) In this case the user of a hierarchical system doesn't run into much trouble because the situation is virtually ideal, but even so a tagging system would have simplified the query. The further you get from ideal circumstances, the larger the gap between tag systems and hierarchical systems grows. Additional thoughts on record oriented file systems: one example is Files-11 from VMS. An interesting property of Files-11 is that it allows files and directories to have multiple parent directories, which is similar to Unix's hard links except that directories, not only files, are allowed to have multiple parents. This gives the system the same expressive power of tags (consider each full path a file can be found at to be a tag on that file.) This allows all of your books to simultaneously be in /Books/ while still allowing you to have them in other locations like /School/cs/cs101/textbook.pdf However a system capable of expressing these relationships is the easy part. The important part is giving the human users a clean user experience, allowing them to take full advantage of the power of such a system without requiring them to manually create and maintain a web of nested links.