Attachment tech

File uploads

Multiple selection

• Check the extensions to standard, some current browsers support this already...
• Flash can do this

Thumbnail after upload

• Can submit the file in an iframe before we finalize the message...
• FileAPI can possibly get at the data locally, could thumbnail via canvas -- check?
• Flash can possibly get at the data locally -- check?

Progress meter

• Flash can do this
• non-flash methods should exist, but look awkward

Webcam access

For photo and video uploads recorded straight from the local computer...

• Flash can do this.
  • Is there a ready-made implementation that can be dropped in?
• HTML 5 Capture API - http://www.w3.org/TR/capture-api/
  • are there any implementations yet?
  • extends <input type="file"> to allow recording from local as well
    • can specify a preference for a particular type of recording source

Drag and drop

Enhanced support for accepting images, files, or links drag-n-dropped from other windows or apps, where supported...

http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/dnd.html

http://www.w3.org/TR/FileAPI/

Some notes:

• http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1115899732&count=1
• http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2009/09/the_html5_drag.html#c12552

The HTML5 DND spec is based on IE's existing implementation, so this may even work in current IE. :)

• We can receive data from outside the application!
  • gmail allows drag-n-dropping file attachments using this system, it should do pretty well
  • they create a specially marked drop-area during drag -- nice as it aids in discovery of the feature
• We need to override a few events to accept drop data
• Data format:
  • dragged data may contain 1 or more items
  • each item is labeled with a MIME type
  • Raw data types:
    • Unicode string
    • binary file with a Unicode string filename
• Note that full file data isn't available until the drop event -- at drag time we only know there's something coming.

jQuery plugin: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/jquery-filedrop

Remote attachment metadata

We get information about remotely linked attachments via oEmbed:

• hosts with known oEmbed endpoints are queried directly based on the URL:
  • flickr
  • yfrog
• hosts with known alternate query methods are queried that way:
  • twitpic
• pages providing oEmbed discovery data are queried directly based on info retrieved from the linked page:
  • YouTube
  • StatusNet sites
• other pages fall back to ooHembed.com's oEmbed proxy

Possible additional methods:

• manual extraction of HTML title, initial text, and a big-looking image (like Facebook does)
• fetch data provided in specific meta tags
  • such as the ones Facebook recognizes itself

Multiple file selection

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/Input.multiple

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/common-input-element-attributes.html#attr-input-multiple

Adding "multiple" attribute on the <input type="file"> should enable selection of multiple files.

PHP side:

• will this be natively supported on PHP side?
  • looks like specifying an element name with an array will make PHP happy enough to accept the multiple files [1]
• do we need to change our code on the PHP side?
  • will need to change a little bit at least to accept the alternate multi-file param
  • should make sure the code accepts both single and multi entries -- existing api and things piggybacking on web ui api might be assuming the field name

JS side:

• FileList interface from the FileAPI can provide access to multiple files that have been selected -- is same interface used for drag-and-drop file data transfer, from what I can understand.
  • Could use common code to process them and submit the file(s) via XHR