2011/7/14 Darin Fisher <da...@chromium.org> > I know that there is also a proposal to add a FileSaver API. I like that > as well, _but_ it is very nice to be able to simply decorate an anchor tag. > In many cases, that will be a lot simpler for developers than using > JavaScript to construct a FileSaver. I think it makes sense to implement > both. >
FileSaver is useful in its own right, but it's not a great fit for this. http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2011-April/031398.html That reminds me of something download=filename can't do: assign a filename while leaving it inline, so "save as" and other operations can have a specified filename. That would require two separate properties. One case I've come across is <img>, where I want to display an image, but provide a different filename for save-as. Separating the filename would allow this to be applied generically both links and inline resources: <img src=f1d2d2f924e986ac86fdf7b36c94bcdf32beec15.jpg filename=picture.jpg>. In that case, rel=enclosure would probably make sense. On the other thread, Michal Zalewski raised a concern about giving > client-side JS the power to name files. > That subthread just seemed to be asking whether browsers should implement Content-Disposition, which didn't seem relevant--they already have, for years. Separately, there was a security question raised about the ability to serve a file off of a third-party site with a different filename than was intended. For example, uploading a file which is both an executable trojan and a valid JPEG to an image hosting site, and linking to it externally, overriding its filename to .EXE. The question there isn't about being able to serve executables--you can always do that--but being able to serve executables that appear to be from the image hosting site. Arguably, it could 1: cause users to trust the file because it appears to be from a site they recognize, or 2: cause the site to be blamed for the trojan. I mention it so people don't have to scour the previous threads for it, but I think it's uncompelling. It just seems like something UI designers would need to take into consideration. (In my opinion, the trust and blame for saving a file to disk should be applied to the host *linking* the file, and not from the site hosting the file, which makes the above irrelevant.) -- Glenn Maynard