[whatwg] File Upload Progress Event (Upload Progress)

[Shiv Kumar]

Areyah, thanks for your inputs thus far.

>At that
>point, the user is already in the process of navigating away from the
>page.

Keep in mind that I'm talking about large file uploads. For the typically user that takes about 2-6 hours. So they may be in the process of navigating away, but that process takes a very long time.

I do understand that I can script my way to doing pretty much anything I please.

I guess I should have been clearer in my previous post.

What I hope is that the new specs are more about enabling Html and allowing someone to do something in a declarative manner (to the extent possible) rather than resort to scripting each time they want to do something. And so my suggestion...

Use case
I'm uploading a large file using an iframe. So yes, the iframe will be submitted, but the rest of the page is intact. I'm still left without having the ability to know how long the upload is going to take and how it is progressing. So while the form is submitting, today we go through quite a bit of hackry to show our users progress. Having the event and information allows us to provide a consistent (across browsers) interface which is extremely important (as you can imagine) and does not require the server side to support this. Currently, we monitor the bytes received on the server side (and no web server gives you easy access to this information) and make that available (per session) to the client UA.

At the same time, if I were to use Flash to upload the file, I don't need server side support to show progress and almost every website (that deals with large file uploads) today uses Flash to display upload progress to their users.

>I do think browser UI for large uploads is terrible and needs to be
>fixed.

I agree! I'd love to see browsers provide their own information in a more noticeable/useful fashion, but I still think surfacing the event and information allows web developers the option to display such information in a consistent manner (across browsers) without having to resort to handling the entire submission process using XMLHttpRequest. Chrome in fact does show a percentage in the status bar but how many people have noticed? And with todays browser trending towards less "chrome" it would mean unless the user has turned on the status bar this info will not be visible.

Shiv
http://exposureroom.com