MD5 Hash Validation

[jimmyhartman]

Is there a way for links to make suggestions to browsers? Specifically, I would like to see links that can provide an md5 or other hashes to a browser so that it can automatically check for corrupt files. Also, if the syntax is flexible enough, a link could suggest alternate sites if the primary site is down or too slow. I'm sure that there could be many other uses for this, including custom key value pairs for custom plugins.

Here is a sample tag syntax that shows the general idea:

<a href="download.com/file.exe" custom="md5:2442349232; sh1:4000384320; mirror:bestdownloads.com/file.exe"> download </a>

[zcorpan]

This has been proposed before... http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatw ... 07825.html

[Le Sage]

both the ideas of the hash & mirror sound really cool, though I would more see something like:
<a href="file.exe" mirrors="1:example.org/file.exe;2:somewhereelse.com/file.exe" hashes="md5:123456789; sha-1:987654321">...</a>

[zcorpan]

both the ideas of the hash & mirror sound really cool, though I would more see something like:
<a href="file.exe" mirrors="1:example.org/file.exe;2:somewhereelse.com/file.exe" hashes="md5:123456789; sha-1:987654321">...</a>

Why would you want to list mirrors in an attribute rather than having separate links?

[Le Sage]

So that the browser (or any download accelerator) could use several sockets to accelerate the download; or so that if the first link is down the user-agent can try the second link automatically, ...

[zcorpan]

Aren't there download accelerators available today that can do this despite the lack of a mirrors="" attribute in HTML? If there is, then browsers can do the same, no?

[Le Sage]

I haven't been aware of such softwares. If they don, they must manage to get a list of mirrors out of special way (non standard defined way), so maybe creating a standard defined way would be good.
If there already is a standard defined way, I'm not aware of it.