File Systems: The Original Hypermedia

> 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.

> 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 :)

> 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”.

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 https://user@emaildomain.com/

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.