Re: New draft of FileWriter API posted

Any thoughts about how FileWriter (and FileReader) might fit into the
world of Web Workers?  AFAIK, the only I/O operation Web Workers
allows is XHR.  File reading/writing in a background thread would be a
real win for the platform.  Do you see Web Workers being expanded to
include the file APIs?

--mike

On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 1:23 PM, Eric Uhrhane <ericu@google.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 1:08 PM, Mike Clement <mikec@google.com> wrote:
>> Hi Eric,
>>
>> [I've tried replying on the public-device-apis list, but nothing I
>> post seems to show up despite jumping through all of the hoops
>> (verifying email address and filling out the questionnaire to allow
>> archiving of my replies).  So, I'm sending this directly to you this
>> time.]
>>
>> For text formatting, it would seem that UTF-8 is sufficient.  I just
>> want to make sure there is a pure binary encoding for objects like
>> images, video and audio files, so that needless encoding to a string
>> (e.g., data url) can be avoided at all costs.
>
> OK, I hear several folks arguing for pure UTF-8 and nobody saying we
> need anything else, so I'll drop the encoding param.  That is an area
> that could be expanded later if needed.
>
>> Also, do you expect the append methods of BlobBuilder to be
>> expanded beyond text and Blob inputs?  For example, how would one
>> capture the bytes of an image or a video object into a Blob?
>
> We have several options there.  Either we add more methods to
> BlobBuilder [or more overloads to append()], or we add a getAsBlob()
> to ImageData, and the image and video elements.  As JavaScript adds
> native support for binary data types [either through WebGL or
> elsewise], we'll also need easy ways to convert that to and from Blob.
>
>> This is looking great...can't wait to use it!
>>
>> --mikec
>>
>> On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 6:49 PM, Eric Uhrhane <ericu@google.com> wrote:
>>> On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 6:42 AM, Anne van Kesteren <annevk@opera.com> wrote:
>>>> On Sat, 06 Mar 2010 03:01:13 +0100, Eric Uhrhane <ericu@google.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> I've just posted a new draft of the File Writer API [1], based on the
>>>>> version I posted in January [2].  I look forward to your feedback.  In
>>>>> the mean time, I'll get going on a clean draft of the FileSystem API.
>>>>
>>>> BlobBuilder should have an overloaded append() method rather than two
>>>> separate methods. That would be more consistent with similar APIs.
>>>
>>> Will do.
>>>
>>>> It is not defined how the constructor for BlobBuilder ought to work.
>>>
>>> I can flesh that out, but there's not a lot to say.  Do you mean
>>> something more than a line like this?
>>> "When the BlobBuilder() constructor is invoked, the user agent MUST
>>> return a new BlobBuilder object."
>>>
>>>> Why is endings needed? Can't the author handle that himself?
>>>
>>> He can emulate a specific platform.  If we want him to be able to
>>> emulate "native", we'd have to tell him what filesystem he's actually
>>> writing to, which I'd like to avoid.  I'm trying to make it easy to
>>> share files with apps external to the browser.
>>>
>>>> Could we get away with not having encoding at all? I.e. always writing UTF-8
>>>> octets?
>>>
>>> That's certainly an easy place to start.  Anybody have strong feelings about it?
>>>
>>>    Eric
>>>
>>>
>>
>

Received on Wednesday, 10 March 2010 19:56:15 UTC