On Jul 17, 2008, at 1:23 PM, Aaron Boodman wrote:
Is the only difference from the Gears proposal the name of the object
("File") and the lack of reading APIs initially?
The Gears proposal has a File object too, as does Mozilla's extension.
We are proposing making the File object usable directly as an XHR
body, so that we can all support file upload through XHR interoperably
without first having to agree on the mechanisms for reading file
contents and representing binary data (which are different between
Gears and Mozilla).
File upload through XHR is useful even without a means to read the
data client-side, because combined with progress events it can provide
in-page progress UI with info for multiple files, which is quite a bit
better than what you get with form submission. Currently some web apps
use Flash for uploads solely to enable progress UI.
As Sam mentioned, overloading send() to take a File does not preclude
later overloading it to take a Blob or ByteArray or any other kind of
object representing raw data.
Regards,
Maciej
- a
On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 1:14 PM, Sam Weinig <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
We would like to propose standardizing a way of using
XMLHttpRequest to send
files to the server. We propose using a similar (and compatible)
API to the
Blob based API proposed by Google Gears
(http://code.google.com/p/gears/wiki/BlobWebAPIPropsal), but
instead of
sending Blob objects, the File objects would be sent. This will
allow the
common act of uploading files, now relegated to form submissions
with an
<input type="file">, to have access to ProgressEvents and the
ability to
abort mid way through.
As with the Blob API, this is reuses the File and FileList interfaces
exposed by Mozilla
(see http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/nsIDOMFile and
http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/nsIDOMFileList)
in a compatible. We are not proposing a specific way to get the
contents of
the files, but that would be a natural future extension. Other
potential
future extensions would be access to the icon associated with the
file.
Objects implementing the HTMLInputElement interface must also
implement the
FileHTMLInputElement interface.
interface FileHTMLInputElement {
readonly attribute FileList files;
};
The files attribute must return a FileList containing all the files
currently selected. This list is live, and therefore updates if
contents of
the input element change.
interface FileList {
readonly attribute unsigned long length
[IndexGetter] File item(in unsigned long index);
};
Each item in the FileList is File, which is a token representation
of file
on the system. The fileName attribute returns just the name and
not the
complete path. The fileSize attribute returns the size of the file
in
bytes.
interface File {
readonly attribute DOMString fileName;
readonly attribute unsigned long long fileSize;
};
Sending a File can be accomplished with an extension to
XMLHttpRequest that
overrides the existing send() method.
Objects implementing the XMLHttpRequest interface must also implement
the FileXMLHttpRequest interface.
interface FileXMLHttpRequest {
void send(File data);
};
-Sam Weinig
