Let's Solve the File Format Problem (2019)
They say file format problem, but one of the reasons why there are so many different file formats is because current file system abstractions are fundamentally insufficient for a wide variety of use cases, particularly ones where you need to ensure that a user can&#x27;t accidentally separate or delete a file. How do you keep a cache directory that backs a file with the file if the file system doesn&#x27;t let you put folders &quot;inside&quot; of files? This is only one of many issues that have resulted in the proliferation of file formats to meet use cases with different performance characteristics that all have the common requirement for data to be bundled together an not be separable. File systems that can decouple the notion of access and data locality from inseparability simply do not exist right now, so we are left with the horrible abstraction that is the archive or zip file.