[whatwg] Multiple file download

[Jose Fandos]

On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 6:13 PM, Ashley Sheridan
<ash at ashleysheridan.co.uk>wrote:

>  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
>
> So how would you decide where each file goes? Would you just pick a
> directory and it chucks all the files in there?
>

Yes, that would be the most common use. Allowing for choosing several
different folders for different files would be left up to the UA. I don't
thing the UA should bother with that, though; the waste of time to select a
different folder for different sets of files negates the benefits of
downloading 15 files in one go as 15 distinct files.


> 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.
>

Agreed that's one benefit of archived files, but I'm looking for a more
general use that's common within the desktop os yet it cannot be reproduced
easily over a web app, namely copy a select set of file from here (website)
to there (a folder in your desktop) without having to resort to
decompression of archives.


> Most operating systems have built-in features to read into these files as
> if they weren't archives at all.
>

Agreed, but it only goes so far. Mac OS doesn't, not natively, as far as I
can see. I remember Windows did, but only for the file you were opening. If
you opened a program to read a file from within the zip and that file
depended on another file also in the zip, it wouldn't work. But that might
have been fixed long ago. Still, this is a request I get often enough from
non-technical people. We are covering this with a Java applet, but that
brings its own set of issues.

/J

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
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/attachments/20100223/e904c38d/attachment-0002.htm>