Joe has released a new draft of AtomPub Multipart Media Creation: http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-gregorio-atompub-multipart-01.txt. And it's now on the standards track, which is great.
Essentially what this draft does is define a way to upload media and the atom entry about that media (in AtomPub jargon, those are called the Media Resource and the Media Link Entry respectively) in one HTTP POST to an AtomPub server, instead of two as per RFC5023. A number of people have implemented "something like this" on their own stacks already; I can see it becoming a default approach to media posting.
The technique uses MIME multipart, specifically multipart/related and not multipart/form-data, which I suspect people working with browsers will be more familiar with. As a result, I'd be interested in hearing anyone's experience implementing atompub-multipart via a browser/ajax client.
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The main issue is that the browser AJAX framework doesn't allow for access to the user filesystem from javascript. Therefore its impossible to actually submit non-text content using the XMLHttpRequest object. To get around this limitation, most AJAX frameworks like YUI and prototype provide a method for submitting data to the server asychronously using a hidden iframe + HTML form (take a look at the YUI connection manager documentation for more details) and the HTML spec limits you to submitting form data as either application/x-www-form-urlencoded or multipart/form-data.
In the end, if the spec goes with multipart/related, I expect you'll see a lot of domain specific implementations that will also support multipart/form-data to support usage of the atom api by their website.
Hi Dave,
Right. I asked about the iframe/form-data thing on the atompub list a while back (different context) and got some confirmation that it's the only way for ajax to load files. I'll raise it on the list.
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