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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

"If files could package and pass around metadata in the same way they pass around data"

They can. It's all just bits. If your files don't and your API does, it is simply because your files don't and your API does, not because files can't and APIs can. Files can have metadata and APIs can be written that treat things as blobs.

There is a distinction, but it's not API vs. file, it's what semantic context you're in. Your MP3 player reads out the ID3 tags, because it's in a music player context. Your backing cloud store (like Dropbox) just sees blobs. Interoperability is less about agreeing on file formats than agreeing on semantic contexts. (Yes, file formats are important but they come later, and most arguments about them are actually arguments about semantic contexts.)

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Saying "it's all bits" is too simplistic a view of file formats vs. APIs. I'm thrilled that MP3 files have ID3 tags, unfortunately that's an unacceptably small subset of the meta-data that I care about.

File formats evolve at a glacial pace and suffer from immense historical baggage. No one benefits from pretending that file formats are as accessible, agile or powerful as proper web APIs.

ID3 supports arbitrary key/value pairs, so it can store any metadata you like.

What are you even talking about? You'd rather use a fucking web API than your local pc when dealing with FILES?!

You are everything that is wrong with modern computing. A web API is always inferior to what you can do natively.

Strike the trendy "web" qualifier, and I'd argue we still have a problem, namely that "data" tends to outlive "behavior" by many, many years, and this fact is important and useful in both computing and civilization at large. This is why, in theory at least, relational data stores are more promising "trans-filesystem" candidates than either method-based object systems or "APIs". Hierarchy is inessential; data storage is not.

To say nothing of the fact that "APIs", Web or otherwise, aren't actually a means of storing data; at least in the context of things like "pictures" and "music", we obviously can never have "turtles all the way down."

Web APIs change on the whim of the provider and have no permanent basis to build on. No one benefits from pretending that web APIs are as stable, composable, or as powerful as proper files.

I italicized proper there because my real point is that you're simply defining yourself the win with the word "proper" and not comparing like to like. You can win any comparison by accounting for only the good of one proposition and only the bad of the other, but that's not a valid argument. If, for instance, we ask our web API to have some sort of assurance that it'll be there next year... hell, next week... suddenly "proper web API" turns out to resolve to absolutely no concrete noun at all. (How "proper" would you have called the Twitter API last week? You know, back just before Twitter started shutting huge swathes of third party apps out of it?)

But that's just one definition. The truth is you need the right tool for the job.

It is all, in the end, just bits. The bits don't have color [1], and they don't acquire color by being in a web API instead of a file.

[1]: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

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