Does HTML5 allow drag-drop upload of folders or a folder tree?

Question

I haven't seen any examples that do this. Is this not allowed in the api spec?

I am searching for an easy drag-drop solution for uploading an entire folder tree of photos.

Answer 1

In this message to the HTML 5 mailing list Ian Hickson says:

HTML5 now has to upload many files at once. Browsers could allow users to pick multiple files at once, including across multiple directories; that's a bit out of scope of the spec.

(Also see the original feature proposal.) So it's safe to assume he considers uploading folders using drag-and-drop also out of scope. Apparently it's up to the browser to serve individual files.

Uploading folders would also have some other difficulties, as described by Lars Gunther:

This […] proposal must have two checks (if it is doable at all):

1. Max size, to stop someone from uploading a full directory of several hundred uncompressed raw images...

2. Filtering even if the accept attribute is omitted. Mac OS metadata and Windows thumbnails, etc should be omitted. All hidden files and directories should default to be excluded.