This is a great opportunity that humanity has lost. Imagine all the stuff that we could have done with some kind of universal metadata format, understood both by applications and OSes:
- You could have indexed all files on your computer or phone, searched for weird stuff like: "Voice recordings I had in the park (GPS coordinates + radius) last year."
- No odd "MIME auto-detect / file detection algorithms".
- No odd "encoding detection" algorithms.
- No Byte order mark (BOM).
- No odd "http-equiv" for storing encoding and file type.
We might have even gone as far as to implement some kind of "metadata firewall" in Internet browsers, to make sure you don't reveal more about your privacy then you choose.
- You could have indexed all files on your computer or phone, searched for weird stuff like: "Voice recordings I had in the park (GPS coordinates + radius) last year."
- No odd "MIME auto-detect / file detection algorithms".
- No odd "encoding detection" algorithms.
- No Byte order mark (BOM).
- No odd "http-equiv" for storing encoding and file type.
We might have even gone as far as to implement some kind of "metadata firewall" in Internet browsers, to make sure you don't reveal more about your privacy then you choose.