This is, without doubt, the coolest part of the A4 protocol.
When you see what cannot be done with modern file systems, trillions of dollars later, and it happens in a moment, automatically, by a simple, recursive routine?
That's gold, magic, great fun.
And if you want to say: "we do that with XML" or some such, bravo. Well done. That's one file protocol, and frankly I'd challenge anyone to write a generic "all XML files ported" routine, because XML is just a hierarchy of <brackets>. You have to start agreeing definitions to start to make use of them.Â
Which is why Sir Tim missed a critical issue (or figured it didn't matter) twice, the first time with HTML, the second with the Semantic Web.
He's a genius, he's rightly honoured, he's made people trillions of dollars and transformed the planet.
No question.
But... the price was unfortunate.
Here's how he could have done it, had he wished to.
Or how we did it, and shame we never marketed it effectively.
Yes, it's not vapourware. We can only type so much at a time... We'll get to it.