[whatwg] Multiple file download

[Jose Fandos]

On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 5:07 PM, Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky at mit.edu> wrote:

> On 2/23/10 5:10 AM, Jose Fandos wrote:
>
>> What doesn't seem to be there, unless a java applet is used (haven't
>> come across one using flash) is the multiple file download. Even Google
>> Docs uses a zip file to download multiple files.
>>
>
> What do you mean in terms of "multiple file download"?
>

Download 10 files as 10 separate files, without having to

a) Okay the saving of each file to your drive independently
b) Downloading them as a zip file that then needs to be uncompressed by the
end user

Imagine a list of files showing on a website (like google docs, or like you
would have in a default ftp listing in firefox). Scripting would allow a
selection of a number of these files and a download button would open a
dialog on the UA to select the folder where the files will be copied to.

You can do this right now in two ways:
>
> 1)  An archive file (your zip example) with the files in it.
>

This is b) which we have, agreed, but not what I meant by allowing multiple
file download. It's allowing the download of just one file, the zip file.


> 2)  A multipart response with the files as parts, each part having
>    "Content-Disposition: attachment".
>

as far as I know, and I could be wrong, this would suffer from what I
described in a), i.e. there would be a dialog propping up to accept each
downloaded file.


> You can gzip this multipart response to get the compression behavior you
> want.
>

I was suggesting the resource packages as a way to make use of
compression/decompression.

/J



>
> -Boris
>
>


-- 
Jose Fandos
CEO

Andekan LLC
5727 Claremont Avenue
Oakland, CA 94618

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