Toying With the HTML5 File System API

Learn the basics of the API file system

HTML5 provides us with a whole crop of new possibilities, such as drawing with canvas, implementing multimedia with the audio and video APIs, and so on. One of these tools, which is still relatively new, is the File System API. It gives us access to a sandboxed section of the user’s local file system, thus filling the gap between desktop and web applications even further!

 

In short, web apps are cool; but, compared to desktop apps, they still have one significant weakness: they don’t have a way to interact and organize data into a structured hierarchy of folders – a real filesystem. Fortunately, with the new Filesystem API, this can be changed. This API gives web applications controlled access to a private local filesystem “sandbox,” in which they can write and read files, create and list directories, and so on. Although at the time of this writing only Google’s Chrome browser supports the “full” implementation of the Filesystem API, it still deserves to be studied as a powerful and convenient form of local storage.

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