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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-03T09:39:08+00:00

I got a bit of a weird issue here. (Either that, or I’m just

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I got a bit of a weird issue here. (Either that, or I’m just overlooking something stupidly simple.)

I have a file upload form, and I want it to only accept certain types of files amongst which MS Word documents. I added the .doc and .docx MIME-types (application/msword and application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document respectively) to the accept attribute of the file input field, yet when I hit “choose file”, the .doc and .docx files are still greyed out as not allowed to be uploaded.

So, what am I missing? Any help or pointers would be greatly appreciated!

(And yes, I know the form-check isn’t a good way to filter uploaded files. I’ve got PHP covering that, this is more of a convenience for the user, so they don’t go and upload a disallowed file.)

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  1. Editorial Team

    Support of the accept attribute has been poor but is slowly becoming more common. On my Google Chrome 19, the element <input type="file" accept="application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document,application/msword" /> works so that the selection is limited to .doc and .docx files. Other browsers generally ignore such an accept attribute, though e.g. Firefox supports some simple cases like accept="image/gif".

    In addition to this, browsers may map MIME types to filename extensions (which is generally what file systems treat as “file type” indicators) in different ways. Therefore, although the attribute may work in some situations, it might make things worse when the mapping is different.

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