On Thu, 26 Jan 2006 03:14:07 +0600, Mike Hoye <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
The validate attribute would describe an algorithm to employ and a result
to compare it to; for example, somebody downloading the en-US version
of FF 1.5 from the Mozilla.com homepage could click on a link like
[a href="http://foo.com/mozilla-i686.tgz";
validate="{md5}b63fcdf4863e59c93d2a29df853b6046"]
and the client could verify as it comes in that it does at least have
the md5sum that's advertised. User notifications could include "no
validation", "successfully validated" and "failed validation", and act
according to the user's wishes in each case.
This can only be useful on the pages like "Select a mirror to download the
file from". It should be made clear that this is not intended for
third-party authors referring to downloadable files, as direct links to
such files are not mirror-friendly.
Also, the user agent UI should make it clear when indicating a "valid"
download that the downloaded file is "considered valid by mozilla.com",
and not just "valid".
I think that another one, probably more useful, attribute for <a> should
be "filesize" or something like that. It would both serve for additional
validation (for example, there's no need to even start the download after
seeing a mismatching Content-Length header) and provide indication about
the file size for the user (the UA could even calculate the estimate
download time).
--
Opera M2 8.5 on Debian Linux 2.6.12-1-k7
* Origin: X-Man's Station [ICQ: 115226275] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
