> The true form of the data is forever hidden from me, a secret of the application that "owns" it.
But that's been true for almost all users, and not just webapp users, forever.
But that's been true for almost all users, and not just webapp users, forever.
SaaS and web kill that.
Given the ubiquity of Word document and Powerpoint presentation files and the like, most users I'll grant you are aware of the files themselves, and the fact that they can be attached to an email. I'll even grant that a large fraction of those same users could answer 'yes' to the question 'Could these files be opened by another application?'. But almost none would be capable of doing anything with those files without an application that handles everything for them.
I don't dispute tho that an awareness of, let alone existence of, files in a filesystem is a significant benefit and not having access to them is a (relatively) significant loss.