The HTML5 download attribute

February 19, 2015 • 1 min read

A drawing of a cartoon man pointing upwards

Heads up! This post was written in 2015, so it may contain information that is no longer accurate. I keep posts like this around for historical purposes and to prevent link rot, so please keep this in mind as you're reading.

— Cory

Years ago I showed you how to force a file to download with PHP. Now with HTML5, you [almost] don't have to do that anymore.

The HTML5 download attribute is intended to tell the browser that a certain link should force a certain file to download, optionally with a certain name that might be different than that on the server. Here's what it looks like:

<a href="/path/to/file.txt" download="any-name-you-want.txt">Download</a>

This will tell your browser to download file.txt and prefill the name to any-name-you-want.txt. No fancy server-side code required. As Mozilla notes, you can also use this technique with data URLs.

Now, of course, the caveat. Internet Explorer doesn't support it, and creating a polyfill isn't really possible. Although you could probably use a combination of feature detection and a proxy server to force the download, but that's really more effort than it's worth.