On Wednesday, April 25, 2007 7:28 PM David Hyatt wrote
I like the idea of having a way of associating a file upload control with
a contenteditable region and I also like the idea of having some way for
the dropped resources associated with the control to display in the page.
The use case of being able to drop images into a contenteditable region
and have them show up as <img> elements at the appropriate place and then
get automatically uploaded somewhere is a really compelling one.
I'm trying to reconcile several things in my mind here:
1. http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-forms/current-work/#upload
From it I gather one will be able to upload multiple files.
2. http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Drag'n'Drop_Uploads
Wouldn't spec editors love it if all proposals were presented so clearly?
3. Using script to do this. See #1 at
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007May/0057.html for some
background on where I'm coming from (grab a cup of tea -- it is
longwinded -- sorry -- that message was written for a different purpose).
Herewith is an executive summary:
The way I used to (circa 2000) allow importation of multiple image files
into a user's workspace was to use file upload to allow the user to pick one
file from her directory. Then I would use script to interrogate contiguous
file names. User consents to upload x1.jpg -- script interrogates filespace
to see if x2.jpg is -- if it is, then ask for x3.jpg -- etc. etc. It allowed
for bulk importation of consecutively numbered images for purposes of making
what I guess we are now calling <video> (levity not gravity) . The user then
used the browser to re-sequence, edit, etc. a collection of images. It was
sorta like a mini Adobe Premier, but running in the browser. Saving the
user's movie was a bit difficult since I could not find any cross-browser
way of saving files to user's drive space (IE's activeX stuff wasn't there
yet I think, and I couldn't figure out how to get signed scripts from
Netscape working in IE). Anyhow, somewhere around 2004 or 2005 I guess, my
little mini-app stopped working in IE.
I rather assume that was because the browser companies discovered that the
technique I was using of allowing <input type=file> to browse drive space
was, in fact, a security risk. On the other hand, the use case of doing what
I wanted to do makes sense (to me anyhow).
So two questions:
A. Am I correct in assuming that the "The min and max attributes apply to
file upload controls " will handle the use case I'm outlining here (except
for the file saving part)? I suppose that once the user identifies a
collection of files then we would use script to swap src attributes of image
tags which we could then drag around or swap or delete or whatever, and that
the drag'n'drop proposal would eliminate lots and lots of script.
B. The statements on security in the WHATWG spec including: "For security
reasons, only content that the user knows is not hostile should ever be
allowed to submit or fetch files specified by file URIs. " ... would this
allow or not my poor old broken mini-app to re-emerge from the dead? (As I
mention in [3] above, I'm not really suggesting that it should. I am
perfectly content to rewrite the gnarly old code, if I really cared strongly
about the thing. It would be nice to know if a rewrite would be possible
without the WHATWG forms proposal, or if the drag'n'drop proposal did come
into existence, then whether or not such a rewrite would even be necessary.)
David Dailey
