Columns

You know how, sometimes, you do something so astonishingly idiotic you can't even get angry with yourself? Last month, I hurried home to install Windows Vista Beta 1 on my main PC so I could use it in anger and get a feel for it as soon as possible. My heroic pioneering spirit didn't extend to the risk of installing it on my main hard disk, though, so I half-inched a clean hard disk from the Labs.

Back in my study, I pulled the side off the PC; I built the machine myself, so there's an impenetrable mass of cabling. And absolutely no chance of getting a disk into a drive cage without disconnecting everything, which, of course, I couldn't be bothered to do. So I propped the clean drive on a couple of paperbacks next to the machine, teased a spare Molex power connector from the tangle and plugged the drive into the PC where it was. Then I unplugged both the power and data cables from the existing drive containing all my documents and data, triple-checking it was disconnected. In this way, I could install Vista with no danger to my precious data, and when I was done I could reconnect the old drive and my machine would be exactly the way it had been before.

With such a concrete guarantee of data security, I breezed through Vista's installation routine and clicked the Format button. And then got that funny swizzy stomach feeling you get when (a) you realise you've left your bag on the train; (b) you realise you've left your passport on the sideboard; or (c) you've just irretrievably formatted your main hard disk. I knew I'd done (c), because the brrrrpping sound of the format operation came from the system tower by my right ear, not the hard disk sitting on the paperbacks on the desk in front of me. Impossible! Except I'd forgotten there were two hard disks in the PC and the important one - now blank - was hidden from view by

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the mass of cables.

But there's good news! Never one to preach without practising, my data is religiously backed up to an external hard drive. And so this column isn't about what you think it's about; the backups restored fine. Trouble is, like most people, I don't have enough spare storage to back up my entire system, only the important stuff: the data. So once I'd reinstalled XP, the familiarly tedious week-long process began of realising application X, required to open document Y, needed to be reinstalled too. And all the little things I'd come to rely on and were set up the way I wanted were all reset to zero.

Windows Vista won't solve this, because a computer's relationship to data is still the wrong way round. Despite all the talk of XML, metadata and tagging, the hierarchy is still resolutely operating system first, applications second and data last. The operating system runs the applications, and the applications operate on the data. Consequently, and ridiculously, backing up just your data isn't enough; the application layer, with all its settings, needs backing up as well to make a proper job of it. This is wrong.

There's got to be a name for the way I want it to be, and I'm sure people are working on it, but it's a concept too subtle to simply Google and get an answer on. Hopefully, someone can tell me the name for my vision of computing Utopia.

I want an environment where data and applications are, at the very least, hierarchically equal. A document should be an active object with the equivalent of specific ports exposed to the system through which it can interact with applications. In exactly the same way as two pieces of network hardware can handshake to establish a common set of capabilities, data should be able to handshake with applications too. Data should say, 'I am this type of data. I want to be opened by an application able to perform these operations on me. If you can do these, open me. If you can't, please drop the connection so I can hunt for a more appropriate application.' The required operations would depend not only on the data encapsulated within the data object, but also on operations that, as the creator of the document, I'd like to perform. There are lots of TIFF image files on my system, for instance, but I want to open some of them with an application capable of doing sophisticated layer-based editing. Others I just want to open to look at in full-screen mode.