Another poster [1] in this thread made better argument than mine: it's not that non-hierachical file organization is bad. It's good (especially for small, homogenous data sets, I guess).
For other data sets it can be improved, and it will be: by adding support for somewhat hierarchical structure. They did it a few decades ago and it will happen again and again.
The example of music is very, very specific [2] -- all files come with diligently filled-in metadata, and all files have same metadata fields. Each song can be uniquely addressed by (artist, title, version) and mostly uniquely by some other tuples.
But that won't work very well for average Excel and Word files, at least not in the way they are created right now; they largely miss metadata or it differs from file to file.
MS Word? Creeping featurism, bullet-point engineering, yea. They painted themselves into a corner. They broke out of it with Ribbon UI. I like it :D
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raganwald, I'm terribly sorry for being irritating in the above posts; I'll try to social up :-)
Comments
Another poster [1] in this thread made better argument than mine: it's not that non-hierachical file organization is bad. It's good (especially for small, homogenous data sets, I guess).
For other data sets it can be improved, and it will be: by adding support for somewhat hierarchical structure. They did it a few decades ago and it will happen again and again.
The example of music is very, very specific [2] -- all files come with diligently filled-in metadata, and all files have same metadata fields. Each song can be uniquely addressed by (artist, title, version) and mostly uniquely by some other tuples.
But that won't work very well for average Excel and Word files, at least not in the way they are created right now; they largely miss metadata or it differs from file to file.
MS Word? Creeping featurism, bullet-point engineering, yea. They painted themselves into a corner. They broke out of it with Ribbon UI. I like it :D
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raganwald, I'm terribly sorry for being irritating in the above posts; I'll try to social up :-)
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[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2301548
[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2301942