Unformatted text (as in text that doesn't follow a machine-understandable format like xml or json) is not a good interface today, I absolutely believe that. Ima

Unformatted text (as in text that doesn't follow a machine-understandable format like xml or json) is not a good interface today, I absolutely believe that. Imagine if "ls" would return an xml table that you could easily reuse in other programs, including graphical editors. Imagine that the OS could understand what every column represents and give it a name. You could do something like ls | showtable in.modified in.filename --sort:1. Of course you can do this today with sed, but in a very unintuitive way not easily accessible for beginners.