<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 6:13 PM, Ashley Sheridan <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:ash@ashleysheridan.co.uk" target="_blank">ash@ashleysheridan.co.uk</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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On Tue, 2010-02-23 at 18:12 +0000, Jose Fandos wrote:
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On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 5:07 PM, Boris Zbarsky <<a href="mailto:bzbarsky@mit.edu" target="_blank">bzbarsky@mit.edu</a>> wrote:
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On 2/23/10 5:10 AM, Jose Fandos wrote:<br>
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What doesn't seem to be there, unless a java applet is used (haven't<br>
come across one using flash) is the multiple file download. Even Google<br>
Docs uses a zip file to download multiple files.</blockquote>
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What do you mean in terms of "multiple file download"?</blockquote></blockquote>
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Download 10 files as 10 separate files, without having to</blockquote>
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a) Okay the saving of each file to your drive independently
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b) Downloading them as a zip file that then needs to be uncompressed by the end user</blockquote>
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Imagine a list of files showing on a website (like google docs, or like you would have in a default ftp listing in firefox). Scripting would allow a selection of a number of these files and a download button would open a dialog on the UA to select the folder where the files will be copied to.</blockquote>
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You can do this right now in two ways:<br>
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1) An archive file (your zip example) with the files in it.</blockquote></blockquote>
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This is b) which we have, agreed, but not what I meant by allowing multiple file download. It's allowing the download of just one file, the zip file.</blockquote>
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2) A multipart response with the files as parts, each part having<br>
"Content-Disposition: attachment".</blockquote></blockquote>
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as far as I know, and I could be wrong, this would suffer from what I described in a), i.e. there would be a dialog propping up to accept each downloaded file.</blockquote>
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You can gzip this multipart response to get the compression behavior you want.</blockquote></blockquote>
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I was suggesting the resource packages as a way to make use of compression/decompression.</blockquote>
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/J</blockquote><blockquote type="CITE"><blockquote>
<font color="#888888">-Boris</font><br></blockquote></blockquote></div></div>
So how would you decide where each file goes? Would you just pick a directory and it chucks all the files in there?</div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Yes, that would be the most common use. Allowing for choosing several different folders for different files would be left up to the UA. I don't thing the UA should bother with that, though; the waste of time to select a different folder for different sets of files negates the benefits of downloading 15 files in one go as 15 distinct files.</div>
<div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div> Also, the genius of archive files (zip, tar, rar) is that you can specify a path within the archive, so that a collection of files which requires a certain structure (a web page and its assets) are retained.</div>
</blockquote><div><br></div><div>Agreed that's one benefit of archived files, but I'm looking for a more general use that's common within the desktop os yet it cannot be reproduced easily over a web app, namely copy a select set of file from here (website) to there (a folder in your desktop) without having to resort to decompression of archives.</div>
<div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div> Most operating systems have built-in features to read into these files as if they weren't archives at all.</div>
</blockquote><div><br></div><div>Agreed, but it only goes so far. Mac OS doesn't, not natively, as far as I can see. I remember Windows did, but only for the file you were opening. If you opened a program to read a file from within the zip and that file depended on another file also in the zip, it wouldn't work. But that might have been fixed long ago. Still, this is a request I get often enough from non-technical people. We are covering this with a Java applet, but that brings its own set of issues.</div>
<div><br></div><div>/J</div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div> Windows can only do this for zip files, Linux can do it for most archive types, not sure about MacOS or other OS's.<div>
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Thanks,<br>
Ash<br>
<a href="http://www.ashleysheridan.co.uk" target="_blank">http://www.ashleysheridan.co.uk</a><span style="font-size:small"><span style="font-size:medium"><br></span></span></td>
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