[whatwg] Priority between <a download> and content-disposition

[Ian Hickson]

On Sat, 10 Aug 2013, Jonas Sicking wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 9, 2013 at 7:47 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> >> >> 1) Content-Disposition: inline
> >> [snip]
> >> > This seems unambiguous. Where's the problem?
> >> >
> >> >> 2) Content-Disposition: inline; filename="B.txt"
> >> [snip]
> >> > Again, this seems unambiguous.
> >> >
> >> >> 3) Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="B.txt"
> >> [snip]
> >> > Again, seems clear.
> >>
> >> I assume that you realize that there is a problem if you think the 
> >> spec is clear, yet people don't understand what the spec intends to 
> >> say, or that implementations do different things, that there still is 
> >> a problem, right?
> >
> > Yes, that's why I asked "where's the problem". :-)
> >
> > I don't understand why the spec is ambiguous. Can you elaborate?
> 
> Sorry, it's been too long. I no longer remember what was considered 
> ambiguous. Possibly the comments in the bugs linked to from this thread 
> has relevant information.

Well, I'm sorry it took so long to get to this feedback, but in any case I 
can't fix something if I don't know what's wrong. :-(


> As I recall it. The problem was that markup like:
> 
> <a download href="foo.txt">
> 
> did not result in a download dialog if a request to foo.txt resulted
> in a response that contained
> 
> Content-disposition: inline
> or
> Content-disposition: inline; filename="bar.txt"

In both of these cases, the spec seems to pretty clearly allow a dialog to 
appear (step 13, reached from step 9 in the first case and step 6 in the 
second).


> Ideally I would prefer the filename from the markup to override the 
> filename from the header, since people tend to get markup correct more 
> often than getting headers correct. At least in my experience. But I 
> could see that the consistency between same-origin and cross-origin 
> would be nice too, so I can live with using either name.

I've left it as is for now, in the interests of reducing churn, and 
because it seems to be what's implemented in Chrome (download="" seems to 
be entirely ignored in Firefox in my testing when Content-Disposition is 
set to 'inline').

   http://software.hixie.ch/utilities/js/live-dom-viewer/saved/2451

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'