Tip: Make file uploads user friendly – usability comes first!

Just wanted to share a thing I just realized. Input files of the type “file” is evil! They’re ugly and they need to be replaced. But it doesn’t seem to happen in the near future. But if you, as I do, use jQuery there are a number of good alternatives to the evil input field. The one I found most attractive is the Uploadify plugin. It’s dynamic, easy to use and highly customizable. It’s well documented and there’s plenty of examples available – and of course a demo page.

It has many advantages over the boring input field:

• Custom trigger for the file window
• Queue
• Restrict file types
• Progress bar
• … requires no page refresh, of course!

This solution requires JavaScript and Flash.

I encourage you strongly, to think about implementing such features. Your user will thank you! I know you want to be web 2.0′ish!