- From: Victor Costan <costan@gmail.com>
- Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2012 08:31:27 -0500
- To: whatwg@whatwg.org
Dear WHATWG, There was a thread on this mailing list discussing making it possible to set the file data behind an <input type="file"> element. http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2012-May/thread.html#36140 The thread seems to have died down due to insufficient applications for the proposal. I would like to urge you to reconsider the proposal, and bring up a few arguments for it. 1) This would make it possible to write JavaScript libraries that seamlessly scan the current page for <input type="file"> and add integration with Dropbox / Google Drive / Sky Drive etc. I claim that changing the <input> value is the easiest and most robust method of achieving this without requiring changes to the main application code. Asides from providing an easy path for developers to integrate online storage services into their apps, this change would make it easy to write bookmarklets / browser extensions that add this functionality to any Web application. 2) If I can set the files attribute of an <input type="file">, I can write unit tests for any code that deals with such an <input>, such as XHR uploads. Tested code is less likely to break down as it is maintained, so it makes for a better Web. 3) Browser extensions / bookmarklets could easily filter files being uploaded. For example, an extension could automatically resize pictures larger than a certain threshold by rendering them to an off-screen <canvas>. As another example, an extension could detect when huge files are uploaded to a Web mail client or forum, automatically upload them to Dropbox / Google Drive / Sky Drive, and replace them in the <input type="file"> with tiny ".url" files pointing to the real files. With these applications in mind, I don't think FileList needs to accept Blobs. Instead, there should be an easy way to build a File out of a Blob and a file name. This capability seems to have been lost when BlobBuilder was deprecated by the Blob constructor. I think sticking to files that can be created out of Blobs would allow the reuse of the current default UI for <input type="file"> with few changes. Thank you for your consideration, Victor Victor Costan | victor@costan.us | www.costan.us | +1 (646) 434-8887 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, B.S. '07, M.Eng '08, Ph.D. '14 Sloan School of Management, B.S. '07
Received on Wednesday, 5 December 2012 13:32:21 UTC