Media File System API

I work on Chrome at Google and a few of us have been working on a proposal
to enable access to local media files - http://goo.gl/L8zXT .  A number of
different ideas [1, 2, 3] have floated around to address this issue so it
seems there is interest but no consensus on the right approach.

We have come to the conclusion that using the File system API to make media
files available will most easily integrate with the web platform.  Aside
from providing a method to get the media file systems, our API addresses
the problem of interaction with media file-metadata. It adds mechanisms to
read and write and search that metadata that are not media specific and
could be used for other file types.

Accessing user's media files from webapps raises a number of privacy
concerns.  To help address this, the getMediaFileSystems function is
asynchronous; the user agent can interact with the user in what ever way it
likes to ensure that they want to grant the given origin access to their
files before providing a result to the page.  Furthermore, being able to
write to a user's media collections raises security issues.  In some ways,
writing to media collections is similar to a user downloading files from
the web.  On the other hands, less user interacting (if any) is required so
the user may not be aware of these transfers.  We're still working out how
to mitigate these potential security issues, but some ideas include setting
the "from internet" bit of files modified through the API, and ensuring
that only media file extensions are allowed so that only appropriate
viewers will be invoked,

It'd be great to get feedback on this API (http://goo.gl/L8zXT) and how the
various proposals can come together.

--
Steve

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI/DeviceStorageAPI
[2] https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/dap/raw-file/16185b62381d/gallery/index.html
[3] http://dev.w3.org/2009/dap/gallery/