File Systems: The Original Hypermedia

79 点作者 pilgrim04 个月前

8 条评论

> if we always had hypermedia with directories and files, why hasn't the web evolved into a mesh of interconnected file systems?It kind of has. URLs have the notion of paths, which are obviously strongly associated with the notion of file system hierarchies. People sometimes (sometimes accidentally) put their file systems directly on the web, see DirectoryIndex in apache for example.> Why isn't a website just a remote directory on someone's computer that we can explore via a file browser?Well now we are getting into the meat of it. To be a hypermedia requires the presence of hypermedia controls in a media. Hypermedia controls can be as simple as links, but the web introduced more sophisticated controls such as forms, and allowed HTML authors to specify more significant interactions beyond click-to-link.IMO the uniform interface is the most interesting aspect of hypermedia, and that really emerged post Web. I like the authors concept of a file explorer enhanced with hypermedia ideas though and would be interested to see more details on it.

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ianburrell4 个月前

If you think that file system is a viable approach to web site, how would implement Hacker News? Hacker News is one of the old-school static-rendered sites. It may not even use a database.But it needs to be dynamic. The ordering on the front page is dynamic. The vote counts are dynamic. What does the voting? These are all easier to have a database with values that query and then render the page.The other issue adding new content. How would someone post a comment? How and where does it get written? How do you make sure they write to right place? How do you make it easy to use as typing in box and hitting button?Dynamic responses are the special sauce of the web, they are why it is a success. Without it, it would be good-looking Gopher.

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moritz4 个月前

> You would create and manage content directly from the file explorer application, in the most natural way possible. This version of the web wouldn’t require users to learn advanced computer skills in order to participate.My students at university (Gen Z) have no concept of the “file system”.

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andyferris4 个月前

I found it took a while to get to the point.In the end, I actually agree with this! I have also been thinking about filesystems, which are trees of of dictionaries (directories) and blobs (files), and that there are many other examples of tree-like data. Data structures in our programs are tree shaped, perhaps with references/pointers to other parts of the tree. JSON is a tree of dictionaries (objects), arrays, and data (the primitive string/number/null). The arrays are ordered, much like the content inside a HTML/XML block.I agree that adding an "array" style of directory to our file systems would be really cool. I've been toying with the idea of writing a FUSE driver that holds some structured data (possibly including arrays) and just converts the (integer) index into a string. The idea is that you could e.g. view and edit some JSON tree with the file explorer. And not just JSON - basically any piece of structured data that we have in our programs can be "viewed" as a FS this way (e.g. just convert structs into directories of fields). It could even be a pretty cool and universal debugger - a breakpoint could make the program pause and serve a FUSE driver and later continue when it is unmounted :)And yes, exactly what follows from this is some program could be written to open some "directory" and render a "document" based on the contents. The filesystem supports links, so we have the "web" like experience.The "document" angle does require adding a kind of directory with ordered array semantics rather than dictionary/map semantics. It's the first missing ingredient listed in the article. Though some filesystems use sorted dictionaries (b-trees or whatever) for directory maps so you could maybe hack this ordered semantics in that way.The second missing ingredient listed in the article is the hypermedia part. I mean my computer is actually OK at inferring if a file is a movie or photo or text document, so we kind of have a way of dealing with that, too. The "blob of bytes is a narrow waste" thing is quite powerful. That said, sum types could be useful to demark different kinds of "stuff", and there's no reason an implementation of this idea couldn't support sum types as part of its data model.

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xnx4 个月前

A usable equivalent of the file system is sorely missing from the web. Every email address should come with a place to publically share files. It could be as easy as <a href="https://user@emaildomain.com/" rel="nofollow">https://user@emaildomain.com/</a>

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jedi33354 个月前

Reading this I couldn't help but imagine of an alternate universe where Gopher won out in the early 90s, but with a more flexible presentation layer. Great writeup

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p_ing4 个月前

I struggle to parse this with every paragraph surrounded by a border. It feels unnatural and extremely distracting.To the author's take of using a file system as an interconnected 'web', we have networked file systems today, typically clustered though.We've also had the _concept_ of a media-rich file system, like WinFS [as an overlay to NTFS], which was dead before it was alive due to the WWW.Networking file systems is _complex_. All vendors would need to agree to a common export model on top of their preferred file systems. Or users would need a specialized partition/overlay developed just for this purpose.FSes are great, but they're not fit for WWW. Without a control plane, they lack any tooling that makes the WWW better -- redirection, access control, programmatic execution of content (ASP.NET, PHP, CGI ...), etc.Ultimately this would be a complex solution. Just like many don't simply "open up" their web server to any and all traffic to any and all content, a file system would need to be carefully partitioned the same.The time for file systems as the vehicle for WWW content is long since past. We have better ways to do things, better caching mechanisms, better performance [through CDNs], better security mechanisms, and so on....not to mention, I certainly don't want to open my personal computer's file system up to the Internet.There would have to be a big leap in evolution of file systems across all major operating systems for the author's dream to come true. I would certainly be excited to see it, but we're talking about allocating _talented_ developers to create a new file system and certainly an open source file system. Like many file systems, it would take years to become a trusted file system to host any content of value.In the mean time, the author can always investigate WebDAV. Slower than dog shit, but it's available with every major web server.

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groby_b4 个月前

> This version of the web wouldn’t require users to learn advanced computer skills in order to participate.The web doesn't require "advanced computer skills". (Unless you use non-flexbox CSS alignments ;) It is fairly trivial to create basic HTML files. SSG + MD have removed a lot of the remaining obstacles. Most web sites are structured files, just with a "compiler" and possibly a database to store the files.But what they still do require is the ability to reason about structured data and its best configuration. And that is the truly hard problem, ever since Ted Nelson first talked about it.It also requires us to reason about how to best make that data consumable for humans. It doesn't just magically "arise from the structure", as much as I wish it did. The web site is a clear example - the lack of understanding how humans consume info, and what helps/hinders, leads to odd boxes around each paragraph.I still agree with the fundamental idea. The more structure we can encode in an easily graspable way, the easier it becomes to impose structure.But even then, the fundamental advantage of the web over hierarchical file systems is the non-linearity. And yes, correct, hierarchies matter, but the fundamental point the article misses is that there isn't just _one_ hierarchy. Wikipedia is a great example here - it fundamentally cannot be expressed in a meaningful way as a tree, even though it has many hierarchies.And hierarchies alone are insufficient. We've now learned, thoroughly I think, that hierarchical taxonomies always break down. If we're given to snark, Linnaeus took a good stab, he failed. In more practical terms, the emergence of "tags" has shown that we need a way to have non-hierarchical cross-cutting data.I think for a discussion of the subject, there's value in separating a few topics:* Presentation. The author is right, HTML made a grave mistake including that* Local representation. Again, agreement here, giving a file system structure that allows to infer meaning for later presentation is super helpful. (See point about SSG/MD)* Organization/Navigation: Any sufficiently complex set of data requires several separate overlaid structures to help humans navigate.* Human psychology: We're bad thinking about relation schemes beyond trees & grids. That means our organization schemes need to mirror them at least partially so we don't break our head. Corollary is that any sufficiently complex set of data needs searchability.There's probably more. It's a topic that's been brewing in my head for a while, you're getting a very rough first draft, sorry :)

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