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I'm seeing a lot of articles about MS Longhorn's XML capabilities.
Here's one:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/134507147_paul05.html
"By standardizing information indexing and retrieval on an open standard ? XML, or extensible
markup language ? the next-generation Windows promises to make a hard drive and network as easily
searchable as the Internet."
This smells a bit like the crack I was smoking in about 1997 :-) [take that,
e-mail filtering software and humor-impaired gummint spy types] Unfortunately, it turns out that
XML-based queries aren't magic UNLESS there is a certain amount of predictable structure to the
markup, otherwise you're just doing a full-text search.
Can anyone come up with a plausible reason why XML metadata (?) would make it easier to "Google" my
hard drive than what can be done with brute-force searching today? Any how could any google-like
indexing scheme help me find what I want in a non-hyperlinked environment such as a personal
computer? Of course, intelligently produced metadata could help but a) MS shows no obvious
interest in the semantic web stuff and b) Windows users are highly unlikely to produce anything
more than "metacrap" if it is up to them to add the metadata every time they create a file.
I can understand how putting "real" database technology into the filesystem could make it easier to
search efficiently, but I don't see what XML has to do with this. Is this just the usual story,
marketing people spreading around, and journalists inhaling, the ol' XML magic pixie dust?
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