[whatwg] Proposal for local-storage file management

[Jonas Sicking]

2009/8/27 Ian Fette (イアンフェッティ) <ifette at google.com>:
> 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

If we added the ability to create File objects, which could then be
stored in localStorage (and WebSQL or whatever will replace it), then
wouldn't we basically have the functionality you seek?

What's the difference between sticking a File in the "foo/bar/bin"
property on the localStorage object, vs. sicking a File object in the
"foo/bar/bin" directory in some FileSystem object?

Note that the latest HTML5 drafts allow for storing File objects in
localStorage.

/ Jonas