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Is that legitimate? A path name is just a unique identifier for a file, IMO it doesn't make sense to put a whole novel in there. If anything, a giant summary like that should be in the meta tags?


In what way is it not legitimate? It's not an accident, bug or data corruption. Someone put it there for a reason, and it benefits their use case. That's as legitimate as it gets.


That's a core part of the problem: a path name is NOT just a unique identifier for a file. Desktop operating systems and their classical utilities conflate the "unique identifier" and whatever "displayed title" of a file though which the end user interacts with the file.

Users care about "titles" or "summaries" of files, not "filesystem identifiers"; as long as the two are conflated, non-technical users will use the identifier to write titles and thus make the file easy to locate in an interactive GUI. Meta tags are not even in the cognitive horizon of most people.




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