Html5 File Api - Availability And Abilities

I just did some reading on File API and I'm wondering now when almost all major browsers are going to support it or supports it already: Firefox, since 3.6 Chrome, since 8.0 ? Oper

Solution 1:

I have no idea when/if IE will support this, but they may be forced to by public demand.

According to the spec the Blob (raw data) is one way to read in a file (http://www.w3.org/TR/FileAPI/#dfn-Blob).

Once you have the data you should be able to process it, as shown in this tutorial: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Using_files_from_web_applications, but you won't be able to write the data back, so you would need to send it to the server.

This will replace Flash uploaders, for example, but until the vast majority of people use new browsers, or you choose to no longer support the older browsers these other solutions will be around.

But, if you want to create a cutting-edge page that allows the user to drag-and-drop onto something other than a <input> tag then some of the HTML5 APIs will be helpful, as shown here: http://robertnyman.com/2010/04/22/using-the-file-api-for-reading-file-information-multiple-file-uploads-another-sister-specification-to-html5/.