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Re: form input field with Browse button (type="file")

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Jan 7, 2003 10:51AM

On Tue, 7 Jan 2003, Carol Foster wrote:

> I recently ran across a form input field that uses type="file" to
> automatically create a browse button to select a file to upload.

The file input field is defined as allowing a user to include a file or
set of files. The Browse button is just part of one possible
implementation, though in practice, there is not much variation in the
implementations of this element at present.

> JAWS 4.2 completely choked on it - -

That's bad news, but it's useful to know it. I have been under the
impression that file input is fairly universally supported in current
browsers, though the quality of implementation varies from rather poor to
almost decent. But since there are serious problems in support, it is
important to provide alternatives to file input.

An author should consider specifying alternatives to file input. At the
simplest, consider a discussion forum that lets users submit their photos
and have them automatically made available to other users. If the forum
maintainer can afford the time needed to handle an occasional special case
every now and then, he should tell, on a page containing the form, that
users who find it impossible to submit their photo using the form can send
it by E-mail to such-and-such an address for manual processing.

Even if a browser has file input support, users can encounter serious
problems, even obstacles. File input is relatively rare, so users may not
know how it works. And browsers implement it in confusing ways, including
some browsers' clueless behavior of setting the default filter for file
selection so that the view is limited to HTML files. Users may think they
can't submit their photo just because they don't know that the filter can
be changed!

For a mostly technical review of how file input works (or fails to work),
with a little discussion of alternatives that could be provided,
see http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/forms/file.html

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/


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