Wherein I occasionally rant on various topics including, but not limited to, PHP, Music, and whatever other Topics I find interesting at the moment, including my brain tumor surgery of August 2010.

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

File Upload Progress Meter

Every week or two, somebody asks how to do a File Upload Progress Meter on the PHP-General mailing list...

Why the BROWSER doesn't provide this feature everybody wants is beyond
my ken.

Surely the browser has some clue how many bytes are uploaded and how
big the file was.

How tricky could it be for Firefox/IE to poke those values into a
couple variables somewhere?

Instead we have a zillion JS hacks by developers generating tons of
traffic back-n-forth to the server to ask it how many bytes it has
received so far...

In fact, why don't the browsers provide a NICE file upload progress meter in the first place, so web designers don't feel the need to re-invent the wheel?

Or even (gasp) some nice hooks involving CSS and Web 2.0 or whatever so web designers can just do this without even needing to know any Javascript?

This certainly would be way more useful than half the crap the browser wars have introduced in the past half decade that we've been needing this feature!

3 comments:

Sudheer said...

I wish somebody writes an extension to Firefox

Peuchele said...

Now it's a reality.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/221510/
Now I'm just waiting for reviews from the Mozilla team, but so far is working pretty well.

Richard Lynch said...

Fernando:
Silver Lining to Brain Surgery:
I'm reading my own blog's comments often enough to see this! :-)
I'll have to sit down and install it, but here's hoping it prods all browser makers to do the right thing.
:-)