So people are still then forced to use Adobe Flash. Is that more secure than allowing multiple downloads natively from HTML5? I believe that with correct controls this can be implemented safely and provide the nice user experience we all are waiting for.
Alternatives? Well,
- There is a way to download multiple files (the user will need to accept a browser popup which states something like in chrome "This site is attempting to download multiple files. Do you want to allow this?"). The problem will be that all files will be downloaded to the pre-configured by browser download directory. There is no way for the user or code to *dynamically* select a specific download directory. A demo can be seen in ftp://angiv.vmhost.psu.edu/agselects/framepost/multi/test/manual.html at the time of this writing. The source code is in http://biesiad.github.com/multiDownload/. You can always download it from github and run it locally (this is pure client side code).
- We could allow packaging in a zip file all documents and then offer the user a way to select where to download in their local file system. This needs flash though (which we have pushed to eliminate for years, HTML5 heard us and provided the "//input[@type="file"]/@multiple"). The problem with this (besides Flash) is that there is not support to download multiple individual files, the user needs to download a zip file and then uncompress later on. A demo for this can be found in http://pixelgraphics.us/downloadify/test.html. The open source code can be reached at https://github.com/dcneiner/Downloadify.
- We could allow drag and drop from the Browser to the file system, a feature Gmail has had now for a while. The problem with this hack (besides having Chrome support only) so far is that it is limited to one file at the time. A demo is available in http://www.thecssninja.com/demo/gmail_dragout/. There are some libraries based on this finding. I leave you google for them.
2 comments:
"The problem will be that all files will be downloaded to their pre-configured by browser download directory. There is no way to select a specific download directory" - You just need to go to Chrome settings -> downloads -> Ask where to save each file before downloading
@DHLee I meant to say there is no way to *dynamically* select a specific download directory. I will correct that. Thanks.
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