Re: [xml-dev] Formatless files

[Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>]

> 
> There are many cases when we don't want "any program" to read our file. And by "read" I mean "understand / get / extract the useful information".
> 
> Consider a file that contains the hashes of (salted) network-ids and/or passwords of the users in an organization, or a smaller subset of this organization.
> 

A classic example was an online game we played as students called "moo" - think Wordle, but 50 years earlier - that maintained a shared file containing the league table of everyone's scores. The program needs read and write access to the file, but the user playing the game must be prohibited from accessing the file directly. Today's commodity operating systems don't make this easy: it typically requires multiple processes.

Michael Kay
Saxonica