[whatwg] Proposal for local-storage file management

[Ian Fette (イアンフェッティ)]

I would much rather have a well thought-out local filesystem proposal, than
continued creep of the existing File and Local Storage proposal. These
proposals are both designed from the perspective of "I want to take some
existing data and either put it into the cloud or make it available
offline". They don't really handle the use case of "I want to create new
data and save it to the local filesystem", or "I want to modify existing
data on the filesystem", or "I want to maintain a virtual filesystem for my
application, and potentially map in the existing filesystem" (e.g. if I'm
flickr and I want to be able to read the user's "My Photos" folder, send
those up, but also make thumbnails that I want to save locally and don't
care if they get uploaded, maintain an index file with image metadata /
thumbnails / ... locally, save off some intermediate files, ...
For this, I would really like to see us take another look at
http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/fileio/fileIO.htm (I don't think this spec is
exactly what we need, but I like the general approach of "origins get a
virtual filesystem tucked away that they can use, they can
fread/fwrite/fseek, and optionally if they want to interact with the host FS
they can request that and then get some sub-set of that (e.g. "my documents"
or "my photos") mapped in.

-Ian

2009/8/27 Jens Alfke <snej at google.com>

> [This is a spin-off of "Web Storage: apparent contradiction in spec". I'm
> starting a new thread to make a specific proposal.]
>
> I agree that where possible we should find a way to do things without
> adding Mother-may-I dialog boxes. But I also believe we need some user
> interaction to enable a site to store nontrivial amounts of permanent local
> data, to avoid Linus's griefer scenario. Conundrum.
>
> But maybe the user interaction can be made to fit into existing familiar
> workflows. In a traditional document-based UI, the app prompts the user with
> a standard Save dialog box when it needs to create a new data storage area
> (a "file"). A default name and location are filled in, but the user can
> customize, or of course hit Cancel.
>
> Why not re-use that same model for HTML5 local storage? After all, we know
> the data is going to end up in the filesystem, so why not let the user pick
> where to put it? This way every web-app gets a separate local file.
> Internally it's probably a sqlite database or DBM file or whatever, but
> that's unimportant. The user follows the age-old save-a-file workflow to
> create one, so s/he is in control of whether it's created and where it goes.
> It gets backed up along with the user's other data. The user can trash it
> later on to make room or for privacy purposes.
>
> Here's what a typical scenario might look like:
> Ellen tells me about a great online animation program. I go to its site,
> and it puts up a Canvas and a bunch of snazzy drawing tools, so I start
> sketching frames of an animation. (Behind the scenes, the app is storing my
> drawings in session storage. This is considered temporary, so the browser
> gives it a reasonable quota without any user interaction.)
> After a while I decide I want to keep using the app, and the stuff I've
> drawn has potential, so I decide to save it to disk. I click the Save
> button, and the site (actually the browser) puts up a standard Save dialog
> box. (Behind the scenes the JS code is writing a value to persistent local
> storage, and since no storage exists yet for its domain, the browser is
> prompting the user.)
> The dialog's prompt is something like "Save SooperAnimator.com data as:",
> and the initial destination is "~/Documents/Web Documents/SooperAnimator.com
> Data". I hit Enter and my animation is saved. (Behind the scenes the browser
> created a new local-storage file at that location, and remembered where it
> put it.)
> Next month I remember that animation in progress and go back to the site.
> My work appears just the way I left it. (The site's script accessed its
> persistent storage, so the browser looked up where it put the file and
> opened it.) I do some more work on it; this time as I save (or maybe it
> auto-saves) the data gets written to the storage file without any more
> interaction because the file already exists.
> Next year I've switched allegiance to UltraAnimate.com, so while cleaning
> house I go through my Web Documents folder, see the old "SooperAnimator.com
> Data" file, and trash it to save disk space.
>
> This seems to end up as a combination of the local storage API with some of
> the behavior of the filesystem access proposal (which to be honest I haven't
> read yet.) In essence the entire local storage object space is implemented
> as a key-value DB file.
>
> Does this seem reasonable?
>
> —Jens
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