[whatwg] "C:\fakepath\" in HTML5
Ian Hickson
ian at hixie.ch
Wed Mar 25 14:39:42 PDT 2009
The long and short of it with the c:\fakepath\ issue is that some browser
vendors have reported compatibility problems with not having this. I
acknowledge that there is some skepticism about whether this is a serious
enough issue to warrant this ugly hack, but given that the concerns were
raised by two browser vendors independently, it seems likely that we
should heed their advice.
I don't think is a huge issue because we will in due course (when Arun's
spec is ready) be adding an API to <input type=file> that exposes the
actual files, filenames, types, etc, and the .value API will be vestigial.
(The .value API has other issues, like only exposing the first file in a
multiple-file upload widget.)
On Tue, 24 Mar 2009, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
> Ian Hickson wrote:
> > According to Microsoft:
> >
> > http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/03/20/rtm-platform-changes.aspx
> >
> > ...the problem was with "a significant number of sites (e.g. education
> > products, several movie sharing sites, etc) and devices (e.g. popular
> > home routers)". The blog post above includes a screenshot of a
> > firmware upgrade screen that has this problem. This is not a site that
> > could be fixed.
>
> Sure it is. You just need a browser that'll allow you to do a firmware
> upgrade to fix it. Which means that if one gets such an upgrade shipped
> before all browsers stop sending paths, things seem to be ok.
Realistically speaking, that seems unlikely to be practical. I wouldn't be
really surprised that someone would want to upgrade the firmware on a
device ten years from now, for instance. We never know.
> I agree they're not as happy as they could be, but they're ok. In
> addition, is the expected lifetime of the affected device comparable to
> the expected time it takes to deploy the new behavior in browsers? If
> so, it's worth it to contact the device maker and ask them to fix things
> in their next model instead of working around them.
We both know that evanglisation efforts don't have a great success rate.
> As far as the "significant number of sites" above... I wonder whether
> there's UA sniffing going on here that causes some of these to assume
> certain things about IE only. We've certainly seen quite a number of
> issues along those lines: we fix a bug, and discover that sites had
> written special browser-specific code taking advantage of that bug.
Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if this was why Opera and IE have seen
this problem, but Mozilla has not.
On Tue, 24 Mar 2009, Alex Henrie wrote:
>
> Example: A site lets a user upload a file and write some comments
> associated with that file. On the browser side, a new input element is
> dynamically created with the name and id "Notes for
> C:\fakepath\upload.txt". On the server side, the server receives
> "upload.txt" and looks for "Notes for upload.txt" to match. It of course
> is not there because the programmer had no idea that the browser would
> be adding appending a fake path in JavaScript but not in HTTP.
That seems like a rather brittle design; what if the user uploads two
files with the same name, for instance? Or uploads an anonymous file (e.g.
a file obtained from an on-board camera)? Or changes the selected file? I
recommend using a unique ID instead, it's much more resilient. :-)
On Tue, 24 Mar 2009, Bil Corry wrote:
>
> I played with this a bit more, it turns out that IE8 returns
> "C:\fakepath\filename.ext" for sites in the Internet zone, but returns
> the real path for sites in the Trusted zone. So even if HTML5 requires
> returning just the file name and is implemented as such in IE, the user
> can still designate their router as a Trusted Zone and be able to update
> their firmware.
This is because the Trusted zone gets their less-standards-compliant "IE7"
mode. I don't think relying on this (or expecting other browsers to do
this) is a scalable strategy.
Here are some bugs that might be related to this issue:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=304939
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=473047
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=440991
I haven't checked if they really are this problem, but it's possible.
--
Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
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