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Re: AtomPub in browsers




Jeroen Hoekx wrote:

Hi,

I've used AtomPub as the basis for a few (2) sites now and while it makes my life as someone who makes a site easier, it is far harder for users. Either they use Windows Live Writer, which is great, but not everyone can install it, let alone configure it properly (in my experience), or they use a custom web based editor, but that does not allow easy image/file upload in a portable way, which is also something authors want.

Browsers can upload files with a form as multipart/form-data. Wouldn't it be possible to specify this behaviour in the Multipart Media Creation draft? This would be far more useful to 99,9% of the web today.

This was mentioned in the discussion on that draft; I got responses along these lines

"True, but has working in a browser ever been a self-imposed constraint
of AtomPub?"

"I'm not sure it's a problem. It strikes me that anything coming from a human-operated browser is by definition fairly low-frequency. "

"Since RFC 5023 itself is not fully implementable in a browser,
I don’t see how that can be a criterion for the multipart spec."

So - it's not considered a requirement. IMO this is why elsewhere "RESTful JSON" is being mulled over; that's another story. I'm guessing the next generation of browsers will support options other than HTML form upload. or someone specs a forms-data variant. Otherwise AtomPub media uploading remains a niche technique in the overall scheme of things. On the upside, what has happened since then is that the multipart draft has been altered so that it is possible for someone else to define a forms option for upload.

Bill