Re: [request] "Download" Event for HTMLAnchorElement

(Can you turn off the Outlook-style indentation quoting?  It makes the
archives unreadable:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps/2014JanMar/0738.html,
and doesn't mix well with regular quoting.)

On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 5:24 PM, Brian Matthews (brmatthe) <
brmatthe@cisco.com> wrote:

>  But I do care about the user clicking more than once. I know I do that
> occasionally, and would be annoyed at a site that wouldn't let me, and I
> don't want to annoy my users in that way. Presumably in that case I want
> the URL and blob to stay around until the page goes away, which I'd guess
> is how it would work?
>

Right, if you want the link to be reusable, then you can't revoke the blob
URL.  Even if the download completes, the user might still click it again.

FileSaver avoids the need for blob URLs entirely, but never got much
momentum.  It might not really solve this problem anyway, since you'd still
need to have a synchronous reference to the Blob for it to work.  If you
had to do an async request in onclick to create the Blob before you could
start the FileSaver, browsers would probably treat it as an unsolicited
popup and disallow it anyway.
http://dev.w3.org/2009/dap/file-system/file-writer.html#the-filesaver-interface

If you're actually generating a large blob of data and allowing the user to
save it to disk (for example, gunzipping a 500 MB file and saving the
uncompressed file to disk), neither of these are very good, since they both
mean writing the big data to a Blob first (probably going to disk), then
copying that to the user file when he saves it.  I haven't been following
the stream API much, but I assume this is something it would help address.

-- 
Glenn Maynard