[whatwg] a rel=attachment

Ian Fette (イアンフェッティ) ifette at google.com
Thu Jul 14 12:22:43 PDT 2011


2011/7/14 Andy Mabbett <andy at pigsonthewing.org.uk>

> 2011/7/14 Ian Fette (イアンフェッティ) <ifette at google.com>:
> > Many websites wish to offer a file for download, even though it could
> > potentially be viewed inline (take images, PDFs, or word documents as an
> > example). Traditionally the only way to achieve this is to set a
> > content-disposition header. *However, sometimes it is not possible for
> the
> > page author to have control over the response headers sent by the
> > server.*(A related example is offline apps, which may wish to provide
> > the user with
> > a way to "download" a file stored locally using the filesystem API but
> again
> > can't set any headers.) It would be nice to provide the page author with
> a
> > client side mechanism to trigger a download.
> >
> > After mulling this over with some application developers who are trying
> to
> > use this functionality, it seems like adding a "rel" attribute to the <a>
> > tag would be a straightforward, minimally invasive way to address this
> use
> > case. <a rel=attachment href=blah.pdf> would indicate that the browser
> > should treat this link as if the response came with a
> content-disposition:
> > attachment header, and offer to download/save the file for the user.
>
> How would this be different to the already-available rel="enclosure" ?
>

It seems quite similar, except that afaik no browser yet acts on enclosure.
I don't want to get into bikeshedding discussions, both enclosure and
attachment have precedent, I simply want to implement this :)


>
> --
> Andy Mabbett
> @pigsonthewing
> http://pigsonthewing.org.uk
>



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