Re: Structured storage? (was Re: dbus and GNOME 2.8)

[Ryan McDougall <ryan mcdougall telusplanet net>]

On Mon, 2004-04-05 at 19:13 -0700, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> On 05Apr2004 07:24PM (-0400), Robert Love wrote:
> >
> > What the goal of Storage, WinFS, etc. is is to decouple the data from
> > the structure of the file.  Right now, complex data formats essentially
> > recreate file system structure inside of each file.  The filesystem
> > should be the ultimate storage medium.  To realize this, and have
> > everything-as-a-file and one-thing-per-file, we need a much smarter
> > filesystem.  WinFS can natively understand complex concepts such as
> > "address book entries" in a very simple and clean way, because the file
> > system itself implements structure and typing.
> 
> Historically, operating systems that provided more structured
> filesystems lost out to simple byte-oriented approaches. In a large
> part I think this is due to the increasing popularity of networking
> and the resultant fact that, ultimately, you will have to interchange
> octet streams. Thus, ultimately you must standardize what the raw data
> looks like, and be able to get at the raw data.
> 
> I do not see how the new trend towards structured storage avoids this
> failure, especially since every operating environment seems on track
> to grow it's own incompatible approach.
> 
> Regards,
> Maciej
> 

I'm no expert, but I was under the impression the structured data for
WinFS or Storage is in human readable, parsable XML. The serialization
method for a network might be a compressed byte stream, maybe using
SOAP? 

As for the byte stream itself we have a similar "problem" in that Unix
uses UTF-8 encoding (instead of plain ASCII), while windows uses UTF-16.

Is anything I'm saying correct? I'm too lazy to confirm it. :(

Cheers,
Ryan