[whatwg] Multiple file download

[Brian Campbell]

On Feb 23, 2010, at 6:02 PM, And Clover wrote:

> Boris Zbarsky wrote:
> 
>> or fixing UAs to only prompt once, to inventing yet another package format here.
> 
> I'd go further: why not just give UAs an option to decompress a ZIP archive (or potentially other recognised archive format) to multiple files (or a folder containing them)?

Some UAs already have this feature. In Safari, if you have the 'Open "safe" files after downloading' option enabled (I believe it's enabled by default, though I usually leave it disabled because there have been a few exploits contained in supposedly "safe" files), it will unpack your ZIP or .tar.gz archives, and delete the archive leaving only the resulting folder. 

> This would require no standards work and would be of general utility for all existing file downloads (I'd certainly be happy to shed a few clicks from the ZIP download-open-extract-delete shuffle).

Yep, there's nothing stopping browsers from implementing this, and there are already browser that do it. It's just a matter of encouraging other browser vendors to follow suit.

-- Brain