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*