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A neutral file system and standardized file formats are a huge part of what has made computing able to do interesting things in the past 40 years. The fact tha
by skohan 5y ago
A neutral file system and standardized file formats are a huge part of what has made computing able to do interesting things in the past 40 years. The fact that one application can output a file, and another can open it and operate on it is basically at the core of the unix philosophy, and the reason we can have things like developer workflows.
If I, as an application author, can only work on data in ways that are intended and officially blessed by another application, we basically have the situation we have on mobile where everything is siloed, and the state of the art is limited by the imagination individual application developers.
- jen20 5y agoI’m aware, and fine with the file system in general. What I do not want is web browsers having arbitrary - or even restricted - access to it.
- nexuist 5y agoHow then are web apps supposed to become part of a more durable workflow (i.e. opening/saving/moving/backing up files) if we do not permit them the same privileges as native apps? I don't think web apps should have total control over your filesystem, but why not at least allow them to operate within a folder?
- tsimionescu 5y agoThey aren't. Web apps can't be trusted with access to barely anything on your system, lest they copy it to sell as advertising. As long as the internet is fueled by advertising, essentially all web apps are adware.
- dmitriid 5y agoOperate within which folder? BTW both Safari and Firefox are not going to implement the File Access non-standards that Chrome pushes. They expose too much, there are no good ways to limit the exposure etc.