A (not so recent) twitter discussion with @larsyencken got me thinking. We were discussing, somewhat frivolously, a file system which in addition to being case insensitive, ignores common misspellings, international differences, synonyms, and language differences.
In all but the most technical situation, file names are, or should be, a technical implementation detail. Average users should not have to consider file names, it just should not matter to them, arguably, the average user should not even be aware of them.
Technology should, be invisible.
Google Drive is doing a fairly good job at this, there are folders and tags which can be used to organise documents, and documents can have a title, however, ignoring the problem created by drive sync, this title is not a file name. You can have multiple documents with the same title. All documents have a unique identifier, but this is kept as an implementation detail and hidden from the user as much as is practically possible.
This post was originally published on blogger, and has been imported.
Image by rohitdarbari : source.