[whatwg] "Content-Disposition" property for <a> tags

[Boris Zbarsky]

On 6/3/11 2:48 PM, Eduard Pascual wrote:
> For a typical snippet of client-side form validation, one or two extra
> lines of JS can beautify in advance for a GET form.

Why are you assuming there's any client-side validation code involved?

> I'm not sure what do you mean by "no one ever sees the actual URI": I
> work on a daily basis with half a dozen different browsers, and they
> all display the URI wherever I navigate.

The URI is not displayed in the url bar unless the new page is shown. 
If the URI results in a file download, it won't be shown in the URL bar.

> Another question could be whether they _care_ about the URI.

They don't, of course.  But that's not even relevant in the "generate a 
download based on form input" case.

> By the amount of things it achieves: besides setting the filename
> (which I consider only a minor benefit), it improves navigation and
> helps SEO (see comments above).

I think you're assuming people care about SEO for the file to be 
downloaded....  In many cases they don't.

>> That's great, and I'm happy you're willing to impose costs on your users so
>> you don't have to use it.  But others may wish to make different tradeoffs
>> here.
> Honestly, if this were coming from someone else, I'd take it as
> trolling. But coming from you, I know that's extremely unlikely, so
> I'll assume that there has been a misunderstanding at some point,
> because that last statement is already taking things too far from
> their context. So, please, let me summarize the whole thing, in a
> (hopefully) clear way:
> 1) Most of my sites use some URI beautification techniques to aid both
> user's and spider's navigation (with a significant effort to minimize
> the impact on the users).

My point was that these techniques, as far as I can tell, impose a cost 
on the user, unless I'm completely misunderstanding how they work...

I agree that if you fix up URIs on form submit on client side that cost 
is pretty small in the common case.

> 2) Because of (1), I haven't had any need to ever use the filename
> argument on a Content-Disposition header: my beautified URIs already
> serve as good enough filenames.
> 3) Because of (2), I do not hold a strong opinion about how that
> argument should be handled on the many different scenarios.

These two were clear, yes.

-Boris