[whatwg] validate attribute in <A>

[Alexey Feldgendler]

On Thu, 26 Jan 2006 03:14:07 +0600, Mike Hoye <mhoye at neon.polkaroo.net>  
wrote:

> The validate attribute would describe an algorithm to employ and a result
> to compare it to; for example, somebody downloading the en-US version
> of FF 1.5 from the Mozilla.com homepage could click on a link like
>
> [a href="http://foo.com/mozilla-i686.tgz"
>  validate="{md5}b63fcdf4863e59c93d2a29df853b6046"]
>
> and the client could verify as it comes in that it does at least have
> the md5sum that's advertised.  User notifications could include "no
> validation", "successfully validated" and "failed validation", and act
> according to the user's wishes in each case.

This can only be useful on the pages like "Select a mirror to download the  
file from". It should be made clear that this is not intended for  
third-party authors referring to downloadable files, as direct links to  
such files are not mirror-friendly.

Also, the user agent UI should make it clear when indicating a "valid"  
download that the downloaded file is "considered valid by mozilla.com",  
and not just "valid".

I think that another one, probably more useful, attribute for <a> should  
be "filesize" or something like that. It would both serve for additional  
validation (for example, there's no need to even start the download after  
seeing a mismatching Content-Length header) and provide indication about  
the file size for the user (the UA could even calculate the estimate  
download time).


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