Re: Consideration of "saving" files

[Adam Elman <aelman users sourceforge net>]

At 4:40 PM -0500 8/3/01, Gregory Merchan wrote:
> On 03 Aug 2001 04:04:19 -0700, Seth Nickell wrote:
> >  So looking into the star trek future of GNOME, what would happen if we
>  > did away with "saving" files, and instead provided a model where users
> [....]
> Lest we enter the wrong kind of flame war, let's make a clear
> distinction which has too often been forgotten. On Unix, everything is a
> file. This does not mean that everything is a file folder or a document;
> file is used here as in the phrase "rank and file". All the proposals
> and discussions I've seen for eliminating filesystems are actually
> nothing of the sort; I find it hard to imagine a useful system that
> actually does eliminate files. Documents and catalogues are a completely
> different matter, and perhaps someone should spec a "GNOME Document
> Catalog System", or some such beast.

BTW, for those of you who are thinking along these lines, I highly 
recommend picking up a copy of Jef Raskin's book "The Humane 
Interface."  I'm about 3/4 of the way through it at the moment.  He 
has some very interesting ideas on what a "non-file-centric" 
interface might be like.

Adam
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