New draft of FileSystem API posted

I've posted a new draft of File API: Directories and System [1].  In
this draft I've rolled in quite a bit of feedback that I received
since first posting it on DAP--many apologies for the delay.  This is
the first draft produced since we agreed to move this spec from DAP to
WebApps; I hope those of you who have time will give it a look and let
me know what you think.

In general I've tried to address any comment I was sent and had not
already addressed via email.  The few that didn't make it in, I've
responded to below.

My thanks to Robin Berjon and Mike Clement for all their feedback.

Robin:
 - "data stored there by the application should not be deleted by the
UA without user intervention", "UA should require permission from the
user", "The application may of course delete it at will" -> these
sound like real conformance statements, therefore SHOULD, SHOULD NOT,
and MAY.

Those are in a non-normative section; is that language still appropriate there?

Robin:
[discussion about speccing the URI format]

Left as an open issue.

Mike:
[discussion about multiple sandboxes per origin]

I think that would be very easy and clean to add later if desired, and
in the mean time, one can use subdirectories.

Mike:
getFile/getDirectory are a bit overloaded.  How about including
methods like exists(), createFile() and createDirectory()?  Though
these methods are easily implemented in terms of getFile/getDirectory,
I always prefer more direct API methods that help make the code easier
to understand.  I expect, though, that you are attempting to be a low
level as possible here.

As Robin pointed out, adding extra round-trips will slow things down.
Also, it can encourage race conditions.  These are easy for libraries
to implement via wrappers.

Mike:
[request for creation time in getMetadata]

It may be hard to support reliably cross-platform [2].

Robin:
[specifying a single locale everywhere]

I don't think that'll make folks very happy if it's not their locale.
If I e.g. try to force my locale on Turkish Windows users, they're
going to see some interesting errors trying to share files with apps
outside the browser, or for that matter even saving certain groups of
files from inside the browser.

    Eric

[1] http://dev.w3.org/2009/dap/file-system/file-dir-sys.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAC_times

Received on Thursday, 8 July 2010 01:51:05 UTC