That gives you a "global naming of things" problem, which is surprisingly hard. Who controls the namespace? Who gets to define new identifiers? Do they end up as intellectual property barriers where company A can't write software to work with files of company B?
> without that key metadata it is impossible to ensure formal correctness(!)
That seems irrelevant - even with the metadata you have to allow for the possibility of a malformed payload or simple metadata mismatch. I don't believe this alone would prevent people from sneaking attack payloads through images or PDFs, for example.
> THAT is K&R’s million-dollar mistake mistake
K&R wrote UNIX before MIME. Not only that, but before the internet, JPEG, PDF, and indeed almost all the file types defined in MIME except plain text.
Refusing to choose also prevented UNIX from being locked into choices that later turned out to be inconvenient, like Windows deciding to standardise on UCS-2 too early rather than wait for everyone to converge on UTF-8.
Even the divergent choice of path separators and line endings has turned out to be a mess.
> cowboys
The "cowboy" system is the one that beat the others, many of which never launched (WinFS, competing hypertext protocols) or were commercially invisible (BeOS, Plan9 etc).
Both Windows and MacOS have alternate file streams which can be used for metadata, but very rarely are.
Memristors aren't going to save you either. Physical space ultimately determines response time. You can only fit so much storage inside a small light cone. We're going to end up with five or six different layers at different distances from the CPU, plus two or three more out over the network, getting cheaper and slower like Glacier.
We probably are going to move to something more content-addressable, in the manner of git blobs or IPFS, and probably a lot closer to immutable or write-once semantics because consistency is such a pain otherwise. It would be interesting to see a device offering S3-style blob interface plus content-addressable search ... over the PCIe interface.
Oh, and there's a whole other paper to be written on how access control has evolved from "how can we protect users from each other, but all the software on the system is trusted" to "everything is single-user now, but we need to protect applications from each other".
