@steveklabnik What makes file uploads special?

Let's assume you have a profile with an avatar field. In the JSON API it's exposed as a URL in a text field. You ideally want a symmetry where the client can set that field to a binary blob and they'll get back the new URL. Some APIs (Stripe, for instance) use an out-of-band upload system, but this brings with it a whole slew of timing and cleanup issues, and removes the symmetry.

This means we basically have three options: we can either submit them as base64 in a JSON body (and eat the 25% overhead plus additional processing), you can submit them as multipart/form-data and ditch the whole JSON-API thing, or you can set them up as a sub-resource which can be edited by uploading to it, like PUT /users/17/avatar (which means you have to handle it separate from your standard download-modify-upload lifecycle)

I think this qualifies as complex enough and encourages bikeshedding in teams enough that JSON-API ought to tackle it, even if only in an extension.

How should we handle file uploads? #246

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