The 2013 U.S. Chess Championship has been scheduled for May 2 to 13 at the Chess Club & Scholastic Center of St. Louis (CCSCSL), and UMBC graduate student, Sabina Foisor, has been invited to compete.

Sabina, an international student from Romania and a Women’s Grandmaster, will be competing in her fifth consecutive U.S. Women’s Championship. She recently competed with the U.S. Women’s Team in the World Team Championships held in Astana, Kazakhstan and helped the UMBC Chess Team finish 3rd in the nation at the Final Four of Collegiate Chess the first weekend in April.

Good luck, Sabina!

NASPAA offers paid internships for graduate students in its Washington, DC office. The number of positions and area of responsibility varies by semester, but each offers an exciting opportunity to work on projects and programs that will make an important and lasting contribution to public affairs education. NASPAA internships are especially well suited for students with an interest in higher education policy, nonprofit management, and public service.

Previous NASPAA interns have secured full-time positions in the federal government and nonprofit sector after graduation, including being selected as Presidential Management Fellows.

We currently have three graduate internship openings for Summer 2013

• Pi Alpha Alpha student ambassador
  
• Diversity in academia
  
• Quality assurance in public affairs education

HTML5 came with all new APIs, new input types and attributes for forms. As is often the case, those major additions often obscure the minor upgrades and I think that this is particularly true of the download attribute.

As you know, there are some files that the browser doesn’t automatically download; images, other web pages and depending on the settings in your browser, sometimes even PDFs. The download attribute gives the browser a native way to download these files automatically, without having to fall back on JavaScript. This is really useful for any app that deals with the downloading of images, such as image upload sites.

Using the download attribute

Since the download attribute doesn’t use scripts of any kind, it’s as simple as adding the attribute to your link:

<a href="myFolder/myImage.png" download>Download image</a>

What’s great about this attribute is that you can even set a name for the downloadable file, even when it’s not the name on your server. This is great for sites with complex file names, or even dynamically created images, that want to provide a simple and user-friendly file name. To provide a name, you just add an equals sign, followed by the name you want to use surrounded in quotes, like so:

<a href="myFolder/reallyUnnecessarilyLongAndComplicatedFileName.png" download="myImage">Download image</a>

Note that the browser will automatically add the correct file extension to the downloaded file, so you don’t need to include that inside your attribute value.

Browser support

Currently, only Chrome 14+ and Firefox 20+ support the download attribute, so you may need to fall back on some simple JavaScript to detect if the attribute is supported. You can do so like this:

var a = document.createElement('a');

if(typeof a.download != "undefined")
{
   // download attribute is supported
}
else
{
  // download attribute is not supported
}

Conclusion

Taking into consideration everything that has been added to HTML5, the download attribute is a very small part, but in my opinion it’s an attribute that was long overdue, and definitely has its uses in today’s apps for both usability and simplification.

Have you implemented the download attribute? What are your unsung heroes of HTML5? Let us know in the comments.

Featured image/thumbnail, download image via Shutterstock.

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If a Web page lacks a time stamp, how do you know when it was created? A new Web application could help.

Ever needed to know the age of a Web page only to discover that it lacks a time stamp saying when it was published?