I am wondering how to hide the text field portion of a standard html file upload tag
for example
<input type="file" name="somename" size="chars">
This generates obviously a text field and next to that field is a browse button... I want to hide the text field part but keep the button.
I'd recommend hiding the whole thing and putting a separate button object which, when clicked, will end up clicking the input's browse button.
You can do this with CSS and javascript -- check out this article (actually the second time I've used this reference today).
You can put an image as a background for the button. That worked for me, a while ago.
The file input button is extremely difficult to style and manipulate, mainly for security reasons.
If you really need to customize your upload button, I recommend a Flash based uploader like SWFUpload or Uploadify that enables you to use a custom image as button, display a progress bar, and other things.
However, its basic philosophy differs from just embedding a control into a form. The uploading process takes place separately. Make sure you check out first whether this works for you.