[whatwg] Web Forms 2.0 - File Upload Progress?

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 14 Dec 2004, Christopher Cook wrote:
> 
> Regarding the web foms extensions to file uploads - when a file upload 
> in progress it would be extremely useful to have a dom accessible value 
> representing either the percentage of the total file(s) size 
> transferred, or the number of bytes of the file uploaded and the total 
> bytes to be transferred. This would allow the developer to display 
> feedback as to how much longer the user is likely to have to wait - 
> (imagine uploading a 46MB movie file and wondering if the site is 
> actually working or if that icon is just going to keep spinning for the 
> next 4 days..) something that can only currently be achieved (to my 
> knowledge) by using server side components to track upload progress and 
> continuously requesting that information at the client side.

In file upload cases, the Web browser itself should be giving feedback, 
not the page. For various reasons (such as the fact that while upload is 
progressing, it's possible for the previous page to already have been 
unloaded) it would be hard for the previous page to actually perform the 
feedback. It also seems better to rely on the UA to do the feedback than 
require every Web author to reimplement it.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'