[269] in java-interest
Re: Uploading files?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael H. Morse)
Sat Jun 10 09:14:42 1995
From: mmorse@nsf.gov (Michael H. Morse)
Date: Sat, 10 Jun 1995 09:03:16 EDT
In-Reply-To: smezak@best.com (Steve Mezak)
"Re: Uploading files?" (Jun 9, 8:38pm)
To: smezak@best.com (Steve Mezak), java-interest@java.sun.com
> I have been looking for a way to do this too, but with plain Mosaic.
> The best I could come up with was a mailto command where the user attaches
> the file to be sent to the server. This seems a bit awkward.
> Do I really have to use Java to do something that seems so simple?
>From reading between the lines of Nasinter and Nebels draft ietf spec
on file upload, I would say that the common way of implementing this
is to create a "helper application" that does the file transfer. It
works something like this:
1. You write a program, unfortunately platform specific, that
the user downloads and installs. Part of the installation installs
the program as the "helper application" (or "viewer") for a
specific file type, let's call the type "application/x-filetran".
(This means you need to know what browser your users have, or your
installation program is smart enough to figure it out.)
2. Then, to intiate the file transfer, the HTML contains a
reference to a file of MIME type "application/x-filetran". The
file itself contains information that the helper program needs to
get the file to the right place.
3. When the browser retrieves this file, it invokes the helper
application to "view" it. The helper application reads the
downloaded file to determine where to send the file, prompts the
user for the file name, and sends it to the server, in whatever
manner is desired.
More on this (along with a suggested change to HTML to standarize
this) at:
http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/html/draft-ietf-html-fileupload-02.txt
However, as I mentioned in my last message, I would also like to hear
about other ways to manage this. The mailto suggestion would work,
but a lot would depend on how well you could train your users, and
you'd be limited in that you couldn't really tell when the mail might
arrive.
--Mike
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