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Comment by uptown | Hacker News Reader

If you're a producer of content ... you care about files.

If you're a consumer of content ... you don't.

When I'm producing content, I don't want to care about the files. I do care, because the technical reasons behind my choice of formats, compression schemes or packaging methods are important. But I'd really rather not have to be involved in those things.

I'm looking forward to the day when the steady march of abstraction provides tools that effectively take "files" away from me.

(Edit: grammar)

I think you're confusing the format of a file with the abstraction of a file as unit of data. Another way to look at the iPad is that it has files but it limits how you're able to work with them.

As a content producer, you want to able to take your unit of data (photo, image, document, etc) and use many different applications to work on it. You might want to make a copy of it, rename it, or move it to other machines too.

No abstraction will effectively take "files" away from you without also taking away the functionality behind them. I'm honestly not sure you've thought through the consequences of that.

I'm not saying the physical file as fundamental computing construct is going anywhere.

I'm saying software is getting to the point where the details of file storage won't be relevant, even to producers of content. Whether your resource is one file, five files or five parts of five larger files will be as relevant 'tomorrow' as where the disk controller has put physical bits on a platter or memory cell 'today'.

The details still matters and always will; there are certainly good and bad ways to store those bits depending on the varying contexts. But no-one's thinking about it when they save a file; no-one's hand-tweaking each decision for individual performance or organizing it so you'll remember physically where you put it.

A "file" is a conceptual entity that implies certain functionality: the ability to rename, move, delete, copy, and classify (traditionally using folder hierarchies). Even consumers need to do these things.

I don't know if this is true for content producers... Why would you care about the file itself if you can create and manipulate the content easily?

You're presuming that you can do all the manipulating and creating of a file without being able to work with the file itself, which I have my doubts about.

You care about files because you have to, not because you want to. As a content producer I consider every abstraction that lets me ignore the fact that the project I'm working on is actually made up of tens of thousands of files in dozens of different formats an unequivocal good thing.

Well, I'm not sure if this is what you mean, exactly, but...

I can take a photo with my camera, plug it in to the computer, import the photo into iPhoto (this is done by clicking the photo itself and clicking import - there's no generic "file" icon displayed or choices about where to save anything), then do some red eye reduction, maybe some cropping, and finally click Share/Email and send the edited photo to someone else. This is all done without ever having to care about any underlying "file."

Here you're assuming all your photo work can be done from within one program (and this seems to be along the same lines as the original article).

I reject this idea completely. Files are powerful because they let me manipulate the same object in many different programs.

But no-one is suggesting that we actually get rid of the underlying files. They'll still exist, so different programs can still exchange information that way.

The problem is more centered on the idea that a document is pretty much useless without the application that can read it. So why not make this link explicit?

Case in point. A friend of mine is in a band - they've just released their first album. Whilst trying to drum up some buzz, they distributed one of the songs on the album as an .mp3. Trouble is, the guy exported the song as an AAC, but he named the file blahblah.mp3. Then, iTunes and WMP both refused to play the file because the format didn't match the file extension. This sort of error should just plain flat out not be possible. It's a song, not a file, and it should not be possible to create grief by stuffing up the name of the object as the computer sees it.

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