[whatwg] Uploading directories of files

[ddailey]

Circa 1999 I built a little thingy: a client-side animation studio. It 
allowed users to point to an image file in local file space. Then I would 
preload the file, parse the path name and go looking for images with 
consecutively numbered filenames in the same directory by attempting a 
preload and checking the status of that -- hence allowing me to "upload" to 
the local machine a series. Once the sequences had been identified and 
loaded into the client-side app, the user then rearranged the sequence via 
GUI to create the perfect animation which was then bundled as the source of 
a new web page, complete with javascript and timing variables. It allowed 
the GUI calibration of all such parameters. It was pretty cool (and 
intensely useful for my students), but I realized as I was building it that 
being able to troll through a user's filenames was a bit of a security risk, 
since I could have shipped the files somewhere without the user's 
permission. I even recall asking some browser gurus about it, but they 
seemed largely unconcerned at the time. The miniapp worked in Netscape and 
IE (with a little tweaking).

Some years later it stopped working everywhere, and I discovered to my 
horror that the nasty "standards" folks had disabled client-side image 
processing altogether, requiring instead that users send all their images to 
my server for them to be able to even see their own files in the browser --  
ahh progress! And all in the name of privacy! How charming.

I really do think that client-side image processing is a useful thing: hence 
folks development of VML, SVG, Silverlight and Canvas. Allowing us to access 
our pictures in a browser app does make sense if there is some way to enable 
it.

cheers
David

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jonas Sicking" <jonas at sicking.cc>
To: <ifette at google.com>
Cc: "whatwg" <whatwg at whatwg.org>
Sent: Friday, December 11, 2009 12:29 AM
Subject: Re: [whatwg] Uploading directories of files


> 2009/12/10 Ian Fette (イアンフェッティ) <ifette at google.com>:
>> 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?
>
> I don't think there is anything in the spec preventing you from doing
> this right now. The fact that only files in the same folder can be
> selected is a limitation in the implementation, not a limitation in
> the spec.
>
> The spec does require that only the leaf name, without any paths, are
> submitted. Is that a problem?
>
> I guess I'd be ok with changing the spec to allow more of the path to
> be exposed. However that would mean that there is a mismatch between
> what name is submitted and what name you'd get from
> input.files[n].name.
>
> / Jonas
>
>