[whatwg] Uploading directories of files

[ddailey]

on Friday, December 11, 2009 6:11 PM
Jonas Sicking wrote:

>I'm fairly certain that any of the major browser vendors would be
>quite horrified if this worked today. I.e. if the page could just grab
>arbitrary files from the users file system. Occasionally people store
>private data there ;)

>However I don't think it's ever been the case that you could actually
>grab image data and send it the way you're describing. While it might
>have been that you could *display* images from arbitrary locations on
>the users file system, I'd imagine you couldn't actually grab the
>image data.

Thanks for your reply Jonas.

Yes, there was no actual grabbing of pixel data, sorry if I made you think 
that, and indeed, I would agree that modern browser vendors would be 
horrified. It was rather astonishing to me, but as I say, my app was working 
in both Netscape and IE for more than a few years. But, yes it only enabled 
local display of images from the users file system and I never tried 
uploading any of the not-specifically-sanctioned images to a server; that 
was not the purpose of the app.  I will be anxious to try out some of the 
demos you recommend, as I have a dozen or so little mini apps, the 
functionality of which has been broken for some time, that do client side 
manipulation of images, for example, this pretty cool one from 2002, which I 
have recently been trying to modernize. It weaves two pictures (in past, 
they could be user-selected) together according to a user-chosen weave 
pattern. I look forward to being able to do this again without having to 
make round trips to the server. If interested, you will note that some crazy 
histrionics had to be performed to get the thing working in Netscape which 
had different pathnames for the local filespace revealed than did IE.

cheers
David