Obviously, JavaScript itself cannot access the filesystem. Thank goodness.
But Flash, Java and other plugins can, and they can communicate with JS.
So, let’s say I wanted to make a page where the user selects a directory on their own computer, and it reads the folder for song files and makes a playlist out of them using HTML5 audio.
What would be the best way of going about getting the contents of a folder?
Neither Java nor Flash are available in all environments. So you will have to use feature detection.
I for myselft would first look for JS file api, then ActiveX to include poor MSIE users, and screw the rest cause I don’t like Java and don’t know about flash 🙂