[shalabhc]

I'm aware of extended attributes and it definitely seems like a step above the completely opaque byte arrays that are the status quo. I suppose we could call it db as a file system.

Another interesting idea is the data types in Amiga OS (http://www.mfischer.com/legacy/amosaic-paper/datatypes.html). I believe it lets applications be generic enough so that as new media formats are added, the applications automatically work with them, without rebuilding or restarting.

Lisp machines were mentioned in another thread here. They also had a better story around sharing data - you shared rich structures (rather than blobs of bytes that are encoded and decoded at every boundary) - and they would update live, etc.

In the end it seems today we're entrenched in something that's reasonable, but many good ideas could be explored more.