It doesn't help that Windows /never/ (still hasn't) developed an actual standard library abstraction of what the filesystem is. In the Unix world your standard library either handles all supported filesystems for you, or more often, just provides a working abstraction of that via the kernel's own VFS abstraction of the supported filesystems.
Literally, in the UNIX/POSIX world there is exactly one way to open a file for a normal application, irrespective of the storage backing for that file and what filesystem might contain it.
(IIRC, it's been a while) On Windows the closest a programmer can get to this is opening up a file via calls specific to NTFS (since it's now the predominant filesystem), FAT (most flash drives), eXFAT (other flash drives), ISO9660(etc)/UDF for optical media, or something else for SMB/CIFS mounts.
For many years I've thought MS should just make a VFS that presents everything as (virtually) NTFS, and use that as the standard library abstraction.
Which of course has very little relation to actually tagging/organizing/search/recall files in a more human way. The biggest hurdle there is probably getting humans to tag/file things correctly and verbosely enough. MOST humans simply can't do a good job at this. For at least 60%, maybe as high as 80 or 90% of the population, it is /literally/ beyond their technical capability to do a good job (at least without a lot of help).
It seems you are correct. I /do/ remember something a /long/ time ago having this issue, but even some quick searching reveals that MSDN documents fopen existing back in 2008, and the notes supporting UNCs. I wonder how the underlying support is handled.
Literally, in the UNIX/POSIX world there is exactly one way to open a file for a normal application, irrespective of the storage backing for that file and what filesystem might contain it.
(IIRC, it's been a while) On Windows the closest a programmer can get to this is opening up a file via calls specific to NTFS (since it's now the predominant filesystem), FAT (most flash drives), eXFAT (other flash drives), ISO9660(etc)/UDF for optical media, or something else for SMB/CIFS mounts.
For many years I've thought MS should just make a VFS that presents everything as (virtually) NTFS, and use that as the standard library abstraction.
Which of course has very little relation to actually tagging/organizing/search/recall files in a more human way. The biggest hurdle there is probably getting humans to tag/file things correctly and verbosely enough. MOST humans simply can't do a good job at this. For at least 60%, maybe as high as 80 or 90% of the population, it is /literally/ beyond their technical capability to do a good job (at least without a lot of help).