“Xerox PARC file-system designs grappled with this problem [whether to put file information inside or outside] as far back as the 1970s. They had an ‘open serialized’ call that returned a byte stream containing both attributes and content. If applied to a directory, it returned a serialization of the directory’s attributes plus the serialization of all the files in it. It is not clear that this approach has ever been bettered.” [“The Art of UNIX Programming” by Eric Raymond, page 467.]