Its really annoying when Apple say.. lets everyone move to standard HTML and then doesn’t support standard HTML.

By not supporting this tag it not only forces people to write Apps but of course, those Apps can only be sold through the App store where they get their 30%.

And even if those apps are free, the publisher is still paying $99 per year to develop them.

Another thing that makes developers do apps and not pure HTML is mobile Safari’s inability to remove the annoying bottom nav bar unless you save the page to a desktop icon.

Its all part of Apple’s evil master plan to extort money from everyone IMHO.

Full disclosure: I’m one of the authors.

I would really like to know how to easily do this! I need a working image upload field for the Android browser.

Is there a way with HTML/CSS/JS to role your own file upload link?

Yep this is really easy on Android to use HTML input field to locate an image from the gallery.

Not so easy on ipod touch.

I think they create these shortcomings on purpose so developers have to learn Obective-C and build native apps instead of being able to easily role a web app.

Do you have any suggestions for making a file uploader in js?

Lack of a general purpose “file manager” on the iPhone is a real problem for certain kinds of webapps. I spend a lot of my time working on a job board platform – where the user normally has to upload their resume (.doc/.pdf/etc) as part of a job application. I’m currently looking at a solution that involves redirecting users to use a desktop/laptop computer to upload a CV into their account if they haven’t already got one in there. I’d prefer not to have to do this.

My first idea would be to enable uploading. Heh. But other than that, I’d say … keep the button ghosted out, but clicking it opens up a dialog that explains that file uploading isn’t possible in mobile safari.

BUT! Apple are geniuses, so, let me take a different approach:

Perhaps Apple tested it in its current form and discovered that it only really bothered UX designers like us, and so didn’t rev it to be better.

I don’t think Apple does user testing, though.

Yeah, they totally should put it like this:

Select a file: … oh, wait, you can’t do that. Go get yourself an Android, loser.

@Brandon – That’s a start, but what if you want to upload other file-types?

@Alex – Yes, perhaps in one possible future, this message will be accurate, but that’s a bit Star Trek isn’t it?