> This is such a basic scenario I simply don't understand why it hasn't been solved. And don't even get me started on the Upload Straight to Amazon S3 via Flash/Silverlight doodads. Nobody can seem to get those working reliably either.

We have > 4GB uploads to S3 working reliably (original video files for encoding are quite large so long uploads are not an edge case for us). You can multi-select files, and the user sees upload progress percentages on all of them. We're using Silverlight (with less reliable Flash and HTML5 fallbacks).

My thoughts exactly. Worse, it's not the only problem like this, even though it's probably the most common and annoying one, and the one that's not solved well by various workarounds. (Date picking is a close second. And yes, I'm aware of the corresponding HTML5 input type. It's still not supported in any major browsers.)

I don't understand why this isn't solved, but even more so I don't understand why most people seem to be perfectly happy with the current state of things. In fact, I get the impressions most web developers like this. They like writing scripts to solve trivial problems or finding obscure scripts that do it for them. Makes them feel helpful and important, or something. Me? Makes me angry. This should have been conclusively solved a decade ago.

I'm seriously considering writing my own toy browser. Not that someone will use it, but at least I will be able to tell for sure how difficult is it to solve all these trivial problems.

Please do. One of the goals of writing the contemporary HTML spec was to make it easier to make a Web browser by actually defining all the difficult things that browsers have to do. (It used to be really hard to make a browser because literally half the work was reverse-engineering other browsers.)

Agree. This is a beautiful implementation, given the state of browsers, but “moving files from one computer to another” seems like it was a solved problem a long time ago.

(See also, editing rich text.)

> (See also, editing rich text.)

I've spent months on this problem. The challenge is that the behavior you want (text ranges) does not map well onto the DOM (trees). This takes some thought but isn't THAT bad. Browser bugs also play a role since the code paths aren't used that often but the main reason is the w3c Range API is the worst API I am aware of in any language and everything you could use to replace it is not cross browser.

this!! I know this is a bit off in a tangent, but after spending a week with the Range API and contenteditable, the frustration is truly immense .. it is truly astounding that file upload and rich text editing, yes, two of the most basic things, are not really solved problems on the web. It's amazing. But also kind've exciting :)

> Sending messages to a PHP server script so you can have the server tell you how many bytes were sent?

Psst.. XMLHttpRequestUpload

† It's the downloading with Ajax that is the problem. There's no way to tell how big the file is.

Psst..

  var xhr = $.ajax({ type: "HEAD", ...
  xhr.getResponseHeader('Content-Length')

I wound up using Silverlight. Sigh.

How hard would it be to use the FTP protocol for uploads? A couple of browsers have support native... I'll look into that.

Edit: yeah, could probably be done with a java applet, possibly hidden. Not sure if it would get all the benefits you're looking for, but I do know the FTP protocol gives upload progress (at least).

For commodity uploading, FTP has firewall problems for too many people. Uploads need to be on port 80.

ftp is often blocked in corporate environments.