- From: Ian Fette <ifette@google.com>
- Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2011 11:45:21 -0700
Many websites wish to offer a file for download, even though it could potentially be viewed inline (take images, PDFs, or word documents as an example). Traditionally the only way to achieve this is to set a content-disposition header. *However, sometimes it is not possible for the page author to have control over the response headers sent by the server.*(A related example is offline apps, which may wish to provide the user with a way to "download" a file stored locally using the filesystem API but again can't set any headers.) It would be nice to provide the page author with a client side mechanism to trigger a download. After mulling this over with some application developers who are trying to use this functionality, it seems like adding a "rel" attribute to the <a> tag would be a straightforward, minimally invasive way to address this use case. <a rel=attachment href=blah.pdf> would indicate that the browser should treat this link as if the response came with a content-disposition: attachment header, and offer to download/save the file for the user. -Ian
Received on Thursday, 14 July 2011 11:45:21 UTC