That's an important way of looking at it, and is correct as far as traditional UNIX operations like fopen go. But it isn't the whole story because many other op

That's an important way of looking at it, and is correct as far as traditional UNIX operations like fopen go. But it isn't the whole story because many other operations require treating paths as text. For example, converting them to URIs, putting them in ZIP files, or looking up a file on a filesystem which internally stores filenames in UCS-2. Threading both of these needles at once basically requires viewing paths as potentially-invalid encoded text.