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
