[whatwg] Multiple file download

[Ashley Sheridan]

On Tue, 2010-02-23 at 18:12 +0000, Jose Fandos wrote:
> 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
> 
> Phone: 415.366.7755
> Fax: 415.373.3858
> 
> UK: +44 797 198 7757
> www.andekan.com


So how would you decide where each file goes? Would you just pick a
directory and it chucks all the files in there? Also, the genius of
archive files (zip, tar, rar) is that you can specify a path within the
archive, so that a collection of files which requires a certain
structure (a web page and its assets) are retained. Most operating
systems have built-in features to read into these files as if they
weren't archives at all. Windows can only do this for zip files, Linux
can do it for most archive types, not sure about MacOS or other OS's.

Thanks,
Ash
http://www.ashleysheridan.co.uk


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