[whatwg] Multiple file download

[Jonas Sicking]

On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 10:45 AM, Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky at mit.edu> wrote:
> On 2/23/10 1:12 PM, Jose Fandos wrote:
>>
>>    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.
>
> Currently yes, but that seems like a UI issue, not a spec issue. Nothing
> _requires_ that behavior of UAs.
>
> I'd prefer just having a header in multipart responses to flag that all the
> files should probably be saved to the same location, or fixing UAs to only
> prompt once, to inventing yet another package format here.

Indeed, if this can be fixed with no changes to specs that would be ideal.

For a multipart response it seems like the UA is free to prompt in any
way it sees fit. However one problem with a multipart response is that
the UA doesn't know the number of files, or their types and sizes,
until all files have been downloaded, right? If there was a way to
indicate this information up front then I think we're good to go.

/ Jonas