File* Specifications | Status and some Promises

Greetings WG,

There are three moving proposals in the File* arena, and I thought I'd catpure what these are and what the status of these are.

1. The File API, currently updated as editor's draft at http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/FileAPI/

Review strongly encouraged :)  Notable fixes are:

i. A File constructor has been added, which has been a longstanding request.
ii. A new static method on URL called URL.createAndRevoke has been added that gets defaults right, and does away with autoRevoke, which nobody implemented for URL.createObjectURL.
iii. A Blob URL Store and a Revocation List, useful for URL Fetch (see https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=17765).

This draft should be ready for LC and should be considered the File API v1.  

2. Re-writing File APi to be Promises based, which should be considered a v2.  The biggest departure from the current state of technology here would really be that we can have Promises right off the Blob itself, which is zeitgeist thinking about these things (and admittedly makes life easier than an XHR-inspired FileReader, which will be made legacy).  The best stab at a strawperson was this one by Jonas:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps/2013AprJun/0727.html

But Stream itself temporarily lives here without too much implementation backbone: https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/streams-api/raw-file/tip/Overview.htm

I think we *should* have a Promises-based File API off of Blob, but I'm not totally sure about the Stream API as it is currently written; I'm amenable to editing the File API v2 portion, modulo our proposal for Stream. 

3. Then there's the FileSystem API, currently discussed here: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-script-coord/2013JulSep/0379.html

This was the upshot of discussions on this listserv, as well as internally at Mozilla.  I'm amenable to editing this, which is separate but related to 1. and 2.

-- A*

Received on Thursday, 15 August 2013 17:50:23 UTC