Jonathan Watt🔒 SSL Verified

Table of Contents

• ↓ Why not copy Chrome's directory upload behavior?
• ↓ The Directory Upload proposal's behavior
• ↓ Why not put Directory objects in HTMLInputElement.files?
• ↓ Uploading directories
• ↓ Future changes
• ↓ When will this ship? Where should I send feedback?
• ↓ Top Alternatives to jwatt.org

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"As part of Mozilla's effort to reduce the Web's dependency on Flash we have recently been working on a Microsoft proposal called Directory Upload to provide directory picking and directory drag-and-drop. (This proposal is a simplification of part of the FileSystem API draft, a much more comprehensive set of filesystem APIs.) After providing several rounds of feedback to the Microsoft guys, the Directory Upload proposal has been made available for wider feedback, and we have an implementation enabled in Nightly builds that developers can play with and file bugs on."

"For those that are aware of it, the obvious question will be why didn't we just standardize the behavior introduced with the webkitdirectory attribute for the <input> element (introduced in Chrome 11, but not available in Safari)? Standardizing that behavior would make it easier for content authors to update existing content that currently uses webkitdirectory to also support non-Chrome browsers in the future."

"With webkitdirectory, when a user picks a directory, all the files under the entire expanded directory tree are added as File objects to one big, flat FileList, which is then set on the <input> element. So it's only after the entire directory tree has been traversed that the change event can be fired to notify the page that the user made a selection and files are available. The advantage of this flat-list approach is that older scripts/libraries that expect a flat list from <input> can more easily be made to work (for example, by adding some awareness of webkitRelativePath). The big downside is that if the number of files in the expanded directory tree is large, then even on machines where I/O is fast it will be a long time before the page is notified via the change event that the user picked something (and that's if it doesn't hang first due to running out of memory). Until the change event notifies it, the page can't even acknowledge that it knows a user selection is incoming, and as a result the user experience can be very poor if I/O is slow or a relatively large directory tree is picked."

"The main difference between the webkitdirectory behavior and the Directory Upload proposal is that, instead of populating HTMLInputElement.files, the latter provides a Promise that is fulfilled by an array that contains only the immediate Directory/File objects that the user actually selected. This allows a page to start processing a user's selection and provide feedback to the user much sooner. Each Directory's direct contents are then only accessed, on demand, via another Promise returning method, allowing the page to incrementally walk the directory tree processing and providing feedback to the user as it goes."

Key Topics & Focus Areas for jwatt.org:

Why not copy Chrome's directory upload behavior?

The Directory Upload proposal's behavior

Why not put Directory objects in HTMLInputElement.files?

Uploading directories

Future changes

When will this ship? Where should I send feedback?