Question

Disclaimer: I haven’t done web programming for ages and am not even sure what or where to search.

Intro

Everyone’s familiar with the concept of downloading files from websites, you click a link on a webpage, the server gets the request containing the URL and responds with the file data appropriately packaged with the content type indicated and all.

Problem

Now, I’d like the same experience, except the data is generated fully on the client side without any requests going back to the server. I know I can generate all the data on client and even dynamically change the viewed page using DOM. But I’m not sure about embedding this data on the page in a downloadable way, whether it’s possible at all and how to do it. Is it possible? In e.g. HTML+JavaScript? If it is, will it work in the major browsers such as IE, FF and Chrome? Will it need HTML5? Or am I doomed to serving the data from the server or using other technologies (maybe Flash)?

Answer 1

You can base64 encode the content into an the href attribute of an anchor a tag. See:

http://webreflection.blogspot.com/2011/08/html5-how-to-create-downloads-on-fly.html