[whatwg] creating a new file via the File API
David Karger
karger at mit.edu
Mon Aug 15 03:40:40 PDT 2011
Apologies if I'm revisiting old territory. I've been doing work on pure
html/javascript applications that work entirely clientside
(http://projects.csail.mit.edu/exhibit/Dido). For persistence, they
read and write local files. There's already an <input type="file">
interface for letting the user specify a file to be read. And I can use
the same interface, inappropriately, to let the user overwrite a
preexisting file. But things get much messier if I want to let the user
specify a _new_ file to be written, because the file-open dialog doesn't
offer users a way to specify a new filename. What I'd like to be able
to do is specify a tag, or a invoke some javascript method, that will
produce the "save file" dialog typical of most systems, with a graphical
directory browser but including the option to specify a new filename.
This problem isn't unique to me; a discussion on stackoverflow appears
at
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2897619/using-html5-javascript-to-generate-and-save-a-file
where the proposed solution is to use flash---and that would be an
unfortunate loss of html5 purity. They also suggest the hack of using a
data: url but that has size limitations.
Perhaps <input type="file"> could be given an attribute specifying
whether a new filename is permitted?
-David Karger
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