Browser, mount that folder, thank You!

These are the stuff every guy, who has pocked the browser or the client-side lately, would like to hear about. Behold the File I/O the W3C spec for local file access.

Here is a description of what it does. The interesting part from the text bellow is outlined in bold:

Traditionally, web applications have had little to no access to resources residing on the local filesystem. The ECMAScript interfaces for file I/O specifies a sandboxed file system, where a widget or other trusted component can gain access to the local file system.

The File I/O interfaces in this specification represent an abstract filesystem, without knowledge of the underlying filesystem’s path separators, conventions for setting file properties such as read/write permissions.

The interfaces provide methods for opening files, writing to them, creating files and directories, moving or deleting them, and so forth.

In order to work with files, an application first has to acquire a mountpoint. A mountpoint is either a reference to a file or folder on a disk, or an abstract reference to a set of files which might not necessarily be within the same folder.

I wonder which folder the typical user will select. Hmmm, the Desktop, My Documents? And where all these interesting files are? Mac OS X user, you’ve got a problem. Don’t mount the desktop. Just don’t!