[whatwg] a rel=attachment

2011/7/14 Ian Fette (????????) <ifette at google.com>

> Many websites wish to offer a file for download, even though it could
> potentially be viewed inline (take images, PDFs, or word documents as an
> example). Traditionally the only way to achieve this is to set a
> content-disposition header. *However, sometimes it is not possible for the
>

This has been raised a couple times:

http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2010-July/027455.html
http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2011-April/031190.html(thread
was derailed partway through)

I've wanted this several times and I'm strongly in favor of it.

After mulling this over with some application developers who are trying to
> use this functionality, it seems like adding a "rel" attribute to the <a>
> tag would be a straightforward, minimally invasive way to address this use
> case. <a rel=attachment href=blah.pdf> would indicate that the browser
>

This isn't enough; the filename needs to be overridable as well, as it is
with Content-Disposition.  My recommendation has been:

<a href=image.jpg download>
<a href=f1d2d2f924e986ac86fdf7b36c94bcdf32beec15.jpg download=picture.jpg>

where the first is equivalent to Content-Disposition: attachment, and the
second is equivalent to Content-Disposition: attachment;
filename=picture.jpg.

-- 
Glenn Maynard

Received on Thursday, 14 July 2011 12:36:13 UTC