HTML5 introduced a lot of new APIs, input types and attributes for forms. However, a lot of small additions were made such as the download attribute.

The download attribute is ideal when your browser won’t automatically download the file; images, other web pages and sometimes PDFs. The download attribute is used to give the browser a native way to download these files automatically without having to fall back on Javascript. This comes in handy for websites that use a lot of images which users can download e.g. image upload sites.

What is the download attribute?

The download attribute is as simple as adding a new attribute to your link tag:
<a href="/images/your_image.jpg" download>Download image</a>
Using the download attribute, we can override the default file name that should automatically be saved even when it isn’t present on your server. This tackles any problems when websites use long dynamically created image names that we want to replace with a more simple and user-friendly file name. To provide a name you simply add a value to the attribute as seen below:
<a href="/images/some_long_file_name_123_123_0192.jpg" download="MyImage">Download image</a>
You don’t need to worry about adding the extension, your browser will automatically add the correct file extension onto the downloaded file.
This attribute is extremely useful in cases where generated files are in use — the file name on the server side needs to be incredibly unique, but the download attribute allows the file name to be meaningful to user.  The download attribute is one of those enhancements that isn’t incredibly sexy but is a practical and easy to add.
Overall, with everything else that has been added to HTML5, the download attribute is a very small part but still, it definitely has its uses in today’s applications for both usability and simplification.