File API for Review

Greetings WebApps WG!

Review on the File API is encouraged:

http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/FileAPI/

A few substantial changes that might need particular attention before we initiate a call for LCWD or something comparably official:

1. autoRevoke behavior of Blob URIs has changed.  Previous drafts made the autoRevoke behavior on by default (by consensus), but didn't harness revocation to a suitable and unambiguous "scope."  Thanks to a fix to HTML[1] we can leverage the global script clean-up jobs list, to which we add revocation of Blob URIs.  Blob URIs are thus either scoped to the next time global script clean-up jobs are processed (by default), OR when document unloading steps are processed if the developer opts out of the default but never pairs it with a call to URL.revokeObjectURL, OR when URL.revokeObjectURL is called.

In particular, this behavior defers from shipping implementations such as IE10.  This is possibly the biggest change:

http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/FileAPI/#lifeTime

http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/FileAPI/#creating-revoking

2. An utility to smooth line ending variations (Unix vs. Windows) has been added, but is an orphan interface currently.  Nobody's fussed over this, and it might not be a problem at all, but I'd like to draw your attention to it :)  While currently only relevant for DOMString arguments to the Blob constructor, we might work with the utility to add other arguments (including ArrayBufferViews, etc.).

http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/FileAPI/#convenienceAPI

3. Progress events have been clarified.

4. readAsDataURL currently makes progress notifications throughout the read, but only returns a non-null return value at the end of the read.

http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/FileAPI/#readAsDataURL

Specification bugs still exist, and this draft doesn't address all open bugs [2]; further bugs and issues, if any, should be logged or discussed on this listserv.  The remaining bugs present use cases that aren't major enough to warrant feature extensions.

-- A*

[1] https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=19554

[2] https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/buglist.cgi?product=WebAppsWG&component=File%20API&resolution=---&list_id=4913

Received on Wednesday, 6 February 2013 19:59:06 UTC