Consider polyfilling for IE using execCommand

[sudodoki]

Any thoughts/wishes on implementing some Polyfill for IE9, since its presence is somehow high on the browser share? Or should it be handled by end-users?

[sudodoki]

My best shim that doesn't involve flash and works fine enough for some purposes is

w = window.open();
doc = w.document;
doc.open( mimetype,'replace');
doc.charset = "utf-8";
doc.write(data);
doc.close();
doc.execCommand("SaveAs", null, filename)

It might be that that's what you called 'proprietary IE API' in #8

[eligrey]

Yeah, that was the API I was thinking about. Personally, I don't think we should polyfill in support for IE due to the limited mime types and confusion that might cause with FileSaver.js users. There's also the extra support I would have to provide. Supporting IE9 would probably require updates to Blob.js as well.

Maybe we could mention this method in the readme. What are your thoughts?

[sudodoki]

I might tell you that even mentioning the way in this issue might be sufficient 😄
Probably not the best idea to have this in codebase since this code won't be 100% polyfill.
I would, however, consider putting link or short description / hint for googling, since some people are discovering this library via Modernizr's Polyfills page so they might be indeed interested in or even solving only IE compatibility issue.

[sudodoki]

I've got to be featured in some project's README. Such an honour. 😊 Awesome lib, keep up the good spirit.

[cpbotha]

On IE9 I'm using the doc.execCommand() alternative with mimetype text/plain and a .txt extension in the filename. However, the file that gets saved still has a "doctype html public ..." header, with the data I saved enclosed by "PRE".

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

[cpbotha]

With this version it worked perfectly: http://stackoverflow.com/a/4458807

Two major differences that I applied: 1. window.open() parameters and 2. removed document.open()