Your comment on #5 is interesting: local storage folders/directories don't correspond to the WWW experience.
Locally, I've got to dig through directories to find stuff. I've got some search tools, but they're generally primitive and/or hit-or-miss. I almost exclusively use the command line, not graphical file browsers (which I find exceptionally tedious).
On the WWW, I generally find stuff through a search engine which, with the benefit of some very clever back-end heuristics, does a really good job of turning up the right stuff. Or I might use my local bookmarks collection, though that again uses a folder metaphor and is a bit tedious to use.
But ... I use the Vimperator Firefox plugin, which makes my browser a lot more like a command line. So when I want to open a web page, I'll almost always switch to command mode and start typing a part of the URL or description of the site ... and Vimperator starts searching through my history and bookmarks for a set of likely matches, which I then tab to and hit <enter>. (Granted, some "superbar" navigation works similarly, though I find Vimperator's operation superior).
My experience is that directories work where you're going to put a certain level of thought into how you want to organize content. But heaps and search tools work better where you've got a lot of diverse content and want to be able to dig into it periodically.
The advantage of the web is that you are browsing the documents themselves rather than som structure hiding them. Since these documents link to each other you do not have to remember folds structures but simply click.
As Ajax becomes more prevalent, some sites and their features/documents are only accessible by some click sequence, rather than via direct navigation.
Well-behaved sites tend to be structured better, and offer navigational clues (breadcrumbing), and the like.
Many sites really don't have much intrinsic structure and are little more than a large bag (or set of bags) of pages or other objects (Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia), though these may have linkages (perferably hypertextual) between objects (notably: Wikipedia and kin).
One of the things I'm liking about using an e-book reader (Moon+Reader on Android, Calibre on Debian/Linux) is that rather than scatter docs through the filesystem, they're organized through the reader interface itself. Not an entirely novel concept -- the man and info commands have used a similar concept for years, and are amenable to organization through tools such as Debian's dwww (online localhost Web interface to locally stored documentation, including manpages, info pages, package documentation, and installed documentation resources). Including search and indexing.
Where the "document" dynamically changes depending on actions th euser takes within it, which aren't revealed/exposed through the URL, then this falls apart.
Locally, I've got to dig through directories to find stuff. I've got some search tools, but they're generally primitive and/or hit-or-miss. I almost exclusively use the command line, not graphical file browsers (which I find exceptionally tedious).
On the WWW, I generally find stuff through a search engine which, with the benefit of some very clever back-end heuristics, does a really good job of turning up the right stuff. Or I might use my local bookmarks collection, though that again uses a folder metaphor and is a bit tedious to use.
But ... I use the Vimperator Firefox plugin, which makes my browser a lot more like a command line. So when I want to open a web page, I'll almost always switch to command mode and start typing a part of the URL or description of the site ... and Vimperator starts searching through my history and bookmarks for a set of likely matches, which I then tab to and hit <enter>. (Granted, some "superbar" navigation works similarly, though I find Vimperator's operation superior).
My experience is that directories work where you're going to put a certain level of thought into how you want to organize content. But heaps and search tools work better where you've got a lot of diverse content and want to be able to dig into it periodically.