November 25, 2009, 7:48 am
A new JavaScript API aims to facilitate limited local filesystem access in Web applications. A draft that documents the new API, authored by Mozilla’s Arun Ranganathan, has been submitted to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) with the goal of turning it into an open standard. The functionality is already largely supported in the latest Firefox nightly builds.
The File API specification introduces a new FileReader object that can asynchronously load selected files from the filesystem. It allows developers to assign custom callback functions to various event handler attributes that are triggered as loading fails, progresses, or completes. It provides methods for reading text or binary data and it has an abort method for terminating the loading process.
