One of the more interesting new features to make its way into the upcoming Firefox 3.6 is support for the latest W3C File API for HTML and also for the Drag and Drop API from the proposed HTML 5 standard. With these two APIs web developers can create powerful app for file management without resorting to proprietary plugins and technologies for the more advanced functionality. For example, it will allow developers to enable users to upload multiple files, asynchronously, at one time even by just dragging them over the web page.
“Firefox 3.6 now supports much of the W3C File API, which specifies the ability to asynchronously read the selected file into memory, and perform operations on the file data within the web application (for example, to display a thumbnail preview of an image, before it is uploaded, or to look for ID3 tags within an MP3 file, or to look for EXIF data in JPEG files, all on the client side),” Mozilla’s Arun Ranganathan wrote introducing the feature.
Mozilla gets into the technical aspects of the functionality with an overview of the basic features complete with code samples. The most common application for the File API is for upload tools, a no-brainer really, but also more interesting uses can be implemented like the possibility to display… (read more)