[dsr_]

Files don't exist. The physical reality is merely a set of magnetic domains, which are manipulated by umpteen layers of devices before humans assign them meaning.

We treat these collections of notional bits - files - as though they exist because this is a useful abstraction.

If you want to replace files, you need an abstraction which is so much more powerful that it will dominate our thinking about information storage, or perhaps an abstraction which is easier to reason about while being at least as powerful.

[afandian]

+1 insightful

Microsoft has been trying something like this for decades with WinFS (for 'this' read 'a richer persistence abstraction offered by the OS').

It never quite happened.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS#Development

[greyfade]

I've always thought that that effort had value, even if it is a failure.

I think BeOS had something going right when BeFS was introduced with indexed extended attributes. Tagging and other metadata are exceedingly useful, so why isn't anyone working on a native tagging filesystem with indexed extended attributes? That would go a long way to making the likes of WinFS a reality.

Even more useful is if we find a way to standardize the communication of these additional metadata, to make the tags and attributes more portable.