[whatwg] An BinaryArchive API for HTML5?
Anne van Kesteren
annevk at opera.com
Thu Jul 30 02:41:37 PDT 2009
On Thu, 30 Jul 2009 08:49:12 +0200, Gregg Tavares <gman at google.com> wrote:
> What are people's feelings on adding a Binary Archive API to HTML5?
I think it makes more sense to build functionality like this on top of the File API rather than add more things into HTML5.
> It seems like it would be useful if there was browser API that let you
> download something like gzipped tar files.
We already have that: XMLHttpRequest.
> The API would look something like
>
> var request = createArchiveRequest();
> request.open("GET", "http://someplace.com/somearchive.tgz");
> request.onfileavailable = doSomethingWithEachFileAsItArrives;
> request.send();
I don't think we should introduce a new HTTP API.
> function doSomethingWithEachFileAsItArrives(binaryBlob) {
> // Load every image in archive
> if (binaryBlob.url.substr(-3) == ".jpg") {
> var image = new Image();
> image.src = binaryBlob.toDataURL(); // or something;
> ...
> }
> // Look for a specific text file
> else if (binaryBlog.url === "myspecial.txt") {
> // getText only works if binaryBlob is valid utf-8 text.
> var text = binaryBlob.getText();
> document.getElementById("content").innerHTML = text;
> }
> }
Having dedicated support for a subset of archiving formats in within the API for File objects makes sense to me. Latest draft of the File API I know of is
http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/FileUpload/publish/FileAPI.xhtml
and the mailing list would be public-webapps at w3.org.
--
Anne van Kesteren
http://annevankesteren.nl/
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