[whatwg] Uploading directories of files

Ian Fette (イアンフェッティ) ifette at google.com
Thu Dec 10 19:23:48 PST 2009


USE CASE:
Many sites allow you to upload multiple files, often images. HTML5 allows
this via <input type="file" multiple>. This works well when your files are
all in one folder, but it may often be the case that files are spread across
sub-folders, and in this case you have to do multiple transactions (or
multiple <input type=file multiple> tags, which is just awkward) to upload
your files.

PROPOSAL: Allow a UA to recursively select and upload a directory of files.
How the UA chooses to modify the file picker dialog is outside the scope of
this spec, but for the sake of argument, assume that the UA lets you pick a
folder and say "upload all". Allow the UA to upload the files in the folder,
with the subdirectories included in the filename with a directory separator.

E.g. assume I have:

C:\users\ian\a\b\1.jpg
C:\users\ian\a\b\2.jpg
C:\users\ian\a\c\3.jpg

If the user chooses "a", the UA should be allowed to send all three files
with filenames:

"a/b/1.jpg"
"a/b/2.jpg"
"a/c/3.jpg"

as it would for the existing <input type=file multiple> implementation, with
the addition of the directories and path separators (not full path, just the
directory the user chose and sub-paths.)

Thoughts?
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