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WICG
file-system-access
Bikeshed2018–2023
WICG / file-system-access

file-system-access

Expose the file system on the user’s device, so Web apps can interoperate with the user’s native applications.

8Distinct people
8Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
711GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Expose the file system on the user’s device, so Web apps can interoperate with the user’s native applications.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 12:45:45 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year8 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-11-12 19:46:22 UTC to 2023-01-13 10:08:42 UTC.

0122018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

2 sources
> Why hasn’t this been tried? https://caniuse.com/sql-storage Supported in Chrome 4, circa January 2010. I'm forgetting the name of it but there is a spec, I think in wicg, for low-level/byte-level file access. This should make using emscripten to compile things like sqlite far more straightforward, to build whatever you want. I like the shout out to streaming changes out of the database, which the author mentions in terms of redux & time travel abilities from having a wal. Server side systems like Debezium for doing this have been gamechanging. At the moment, the high-level file api has no support for watching for changes (https://github.com/WICG/file-system-access/issues/72). Maybe post 1.0 we might see progress. I don't believe the low-level api has anything for watching for changes. From a more meta-assesment level of this article: I
Read the rest
do hope we can stick with HTTP centric entities, personally. GraphQL with it's generic endpoint that all operations get sent to is, in my view, quite a bad development. But not irreconcileably so: bridges could be built. I'm definitely in favor of experimentation, trying things out. But I also think there's good reasons to keep entities and their urls around, to not abandon that. GraphQL right now doesn't seem to think about that or care about that, but I also think it could be reformed.
In Don’t we all just want to use SQL on the front end?

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