::scr Ramblings of a Classic Refugee or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love OS X

[Simon Wistow]

On Sun, Feb 03, 2002 at 04:54:11PM +0000, Matt Webb said:
> On this topic,
> http://www.namesys.com/whitepaper.html
> looks interesting (although I admit I've not been able to read it to the 
> end). Kind of xpath meets filesystems.

Yes. Umm, that's why I quoted it as well :)
 
> But god yes, the current filesystem sucks. You only have to look at the 
> way email clients, mp3 programs, photo archives etc etc reimplement 
> their own filing systems.
[ snippage ]
> Yeah! That's views, or dynamic searches, or whatever you want to call 
> them. On that,

They would rock. The big problems here are 

1. performance - 
FS access would be *slow*. But memory is cheap and I've got clock cycles
to burn so we'll let Mr Moore take care of that for us.

2. transferability -
Apples already have a problem with this and I have mares getting files
off my two Mac people - currently I have a script 

% cat ~/bin/demac
#!/bin/sh

hexbin $1
macunpack -Uv $1.bin
rm $1.bin
% 

which extracts stuff they send me. I could make it auto convert line
endings on text files with a bit of mime.magic I suppose but it suffices
for now. 

The other problems are the metadata (dealt with by Samba by leaving
.AppleDouble files all over the shop) and case sensitivity. Have the
deltas to our CVS server seem to be me fixing up the Java/Mac guy and
his 

public class Foo {} 

antics in foo.java files.

</geek out>

OSX has dealt with this by adding file extensions IIRC. If I wind Paul
up enough he'll rant on cue I 'spect.

So how would you deal with this? Well, my idea would be this. It's based
on my experiences with SWF and I think it'd rock hard.

Effectively DB file systems and also individual files would have the
equivalent of DTDs (the file that describes an XML file for the buzzword
protected) but for lovely shiny binary files. Al Snell would be proud. 

Essentially it would describe the data contained within the
file/filesystem. When you transferred a directory over if you didn't
already have the correct DTD it would get transferred over aswell.

Since this would also be available for individual document types as well
you could write tools for any programming language on any platform that,
given one of these DTDs would automatically produce a library that could
read/write it. No more not being able to read word documents on Linux,
no having to write your own HTML parser, it would be easy to save out
the results of the graph of x vs y vs time as either Flash, MPEG,
Quicktime or animated Gif.

Of course there are *some* issues but if I hand wave sufficently then I
can gloss over them.



> So number one, get rid of all menu options in computer interfaces. And 
> dialogue boxes. And anything else that appears. All on-screen 
> manipulation should be done:
> - by pulling a tool over to act-at-a-place; or
> - by looking "closer" at the item to alter its properties

This sounds suspiciously close to 'my' idea of document centric
interfaces which I keep bringing up.

have a look at http://www.thegestalt.org/scr/old/msg00023.html

for incoherent ramblings and half baked ideas.
 
> Okay, so it's all quite up in the air, and the whole Looking idea is 
> fairly undefined, but it's the lack of human reality in computer 
> interfaces that's causing all these problems.
> 
> [insert Whole Other Rant here.]

Please do :)

> <delurks />

That goes for the rest of the lurkers out there. You know who you are.
My all seeing collection of stats harvesting scripts is omniscent and
carefully marks out people for 'educational correction'.

[SIMON grins the grin of something that usually lurks on river banks
pretending to be a log]

The Management