I hear that Firefox 3.6 adds support for the HTML local file API (Announcement here).
Does this mean that I can access local files from javascript?
Can anyone point me to examples for reading / writing local files?
I would love to be able to read / write simple text files.
Many thanks
You can find a (mozilla-specific explanation of the API on the Mozilla Development Center.
It doesn't allow accessing arbitrary local files. It's more of a file upload improvement. For instance, you can have some Javascript accept a drag-and-drop file initiated by the user of the browser.
You can find the W3C spec on it here.
The only files you can access are files dropped from the desktop or files that has been selected from an <input/> tag. See the demo I've written here: http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/12/uploading-files-with-xmlhttprequest/