[whatwg] Multiple file download

[Eric Uhrhane]

On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 12:28 AM, timeless <timeless at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 3:31 AM, Jose Fandos <iaminlondon at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Er... sure. It is not as convenient for certain web apps when compared to
>> desktop apps. With this supported, the gap get's reduced.
>
> Adding support for tar (and all of its variations) involves adding
> extra code, testing, etc. to browsers. This is sometimes called bloat,
> and can be painful for browsers that work on mobile devices. Things
> aren't "free", especially not duplicative features.
>
> I'm quite happy to demand that web sites include code for generating Zip files.
>
> http://www.pkware.com/documents/casestudies/APPNOTE.TXT V. General
> Format of a .ZIP file
>
> the zip format is fairly streaming friendly, the directory is at the
> end of the file. And if you're actually generating a file which has so
> many records that you can't remember all of them, you're probably
> trying to attack my user agent, so I'm quite happy that you'd fail.

Isn't a format that has its directory at the end about as
streaming-UNfriendly as you can get?  You need to pull the whole thing
down before you can take it apart.  With a .tar.gz, you can unpack
files as they arrive.

     Eric