HTML5 download Attribute

I tend to get caught up on the JavaScript side of the HTML5 revolution, and can you blame me? HTML5 gives us awesome "big" stuff like WebSockets, Web Workers, History, Storage and little helpers like the Element classList collection. There are, however, smaller features in HTML5 that we can appreciate; one of those would be the new download attribute. The download attribute allows you to set a separate file download name than the actual link endpoint itself.

The HTML

Place the download attribute on a link...

<!-- will download as "expenses.pdf" --> <a href="/files/adlafjlxjewfasd89asd8f.pdf" download="expenses.pdf">Download Your Expense Report</a>

...and when the user clicks the link, the download attribute appears in the save dialog instead of the garbled mess that was there before. In this case, the file will be downloaded as expenses.pdf . The download attribute also triggers a force download, something that I used to do on the server side with PHP.