[whatwg] input type=upload (not just files) proposal

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 8 Jun 2010, Eitan Adler wrote:
>
> A lot of websites let you upload either from a file on your hard drive 
> or from a link on the web. Most of the time this is done by having two 
> different inputs: One for a file and the other for a URL.
> 
> If there were some type of input like "upload' which will allow for
> any complete input.
> Something like
> file:///home/eitan/file_to_upload.pdf
> or
> http://example.com/file.pdf
> or
> ftp://user:password@example.com/file.pdf
> 
> It would then be the server's job to fetch the file unless the user 
> passed it a file:// scheme it which case the file would be provided by 
> the UI.

As far as I can tell nothing stops a browser from doing this today with 
<input type=file>. Indeed, on Windows it's probably already supported 
since the default Open File dialog supports URLs.


On Wed, 9 Jun 2010, Rob Evans wrote:
> 
> I think an interesting addition to the input type=upload would be a 
> script-accessible progress value. Either as a percentage, or probably 
> more useful two values, one being the size of the upload and the other 
> being current bytes sent.

I think it might make sense to expose file upload progress on a <form> 
to a same-origin server. It would be interesting to see how the equivalent 
feature in XMLHttpRequest is received before we add this, though.

I've made a note of it.


> Also whilst we're on the subject, how about allowing multiple files to 
> be selected from a single input element?

This is in the spec now.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
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