File API: we read the necessary files with the javascript from the visitor’s computer (by agreement of this visitor)

Today, PsychodelEKS accurately noticed about the javascript file compression API recently built into Yahoo in BrowserPlus:

I already thought that they ported the compression algorithm to js, ​​but it turned out that it was just a browser interface to the archiver =)

But the ability to compress large amounts of text (json) data on the client side before sending it to the server would be convenient in modern web applications.

The end of the quote.

On this subject, I am very happy to inform all of you good news: in the depths of W3C editor Arun Ranganathan (Arun Ranganathan) prepares the draft standard the File the API , largely supported by the fresh nightly builds of Firefox. This standard defines special APIs through which the javascript can read files on the user's machine, then convert them differently , making “data: ...” or base64-encoded strings, if necessary , and then doing whatever they want with them ( for example, send to the server, or use in javascript, or in CSS ...). Accordingly, as soon as any

a good soul porting archiver algorithms to javascript, so it will immediately become possible to compress files with javascript before sending them to a remote server.

(This is exactly what the new BrowserPlus API does, so then it will not be needed for this purpose, but Firefox alone will be enough.)

So far, this has not happened yet, I suggest you to watch one spectacular application recently mentioned on hacks.mozilla.org - it is called Font Dragr , it is hung on some site and allows the site reader to drop (drag-n-drop) on the page of this site anya font file from your own disk so that this page is displayed on the site with this particular font. It starts displaying immediately, since the file is not transferred to the server, but is converted and fed to the browser through CSS.

In particular, it is useful for the developer of such a site so that he does not need to edit CSS on the server each time. You can even work offline with such a page.