Re: File API - Progress - Question about Partial Blob data

On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 8:35 AM, Arun Ranganathan <arun@mozilla.com> wrote:
> On Aug 22, 2013, at 12:07 PM, Jonas Sicking wrote:
>
>> I think you might have misunderstood my initial comment.
>>
>> I agree that the current partial data solution is not good. I think we
>> should remove it.
>>
>
>
> I'd really like other implementors to weigh in before we remove Partial Blob Data.  Cc'ing folks who helped with it.

Eric Urhane asked me to follow up on this thread on behalf of Gregg
Tavares who unfortunately left Google.

The current spec for partial blob data is too inefficient, because it
accumulates all of the data since the beginning of the download. This
is not what's desired for streaming downloads of large data sets.
What's needed is a way to retrieve the data downloaded since the last
query. Several web developers have asked about this recently as
they're trying to stream ever larger 3D data sets into the browser.


>> I think we should instead create a better solution in v2 of the API
>> which is based on something other than FileReader and which has the
>> ability to deliver data on the form of "here's the data that was
>> loaded since last notification".
>
>
> I agree that we should do a better way.

Agreed. It would be really good to finally make progress in this area.

It sounds like Microsoft's Streams API proposal at
https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/streams-api/raw-file/tip/Overview.htm or
tyoshino's Streams with Promises propsal at
http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/tyoshino/stream/blob/master/streams.html
are two leading contenders. I personally don't care which flavor is
chosen so long as things move forward. Microsoft's proposal does seem
more fully fleshed out. (At least, it contains fewer instances of the
word "blah". :) )

-Ken

Received on Monday, 26 August 2013 23:37:49 UTC