I'd like to add my .02 here. It's not 100% bulletproof, but I think it's good enough.
The problem, for me, with the preferred example of putting up some sort of "this site doesn't work so well without Javascript" message is that you then need to make sure that your site works okay without Javascript. And once you've started down that road, then you start realizing that the site should be bulletproof with JS turned off, and that's a whole big chunk of additional work.
So, what you really want is a "redirection" to a page that says "turn on JS, silly". But, of course, you can't reliably do meta redirections. So, here's the suggestion:
<noscript>
<style type="text/css">
.pagecontainer {display:none;}
</style>
<div class="noscriptmsg">
You don't have javascript enabled. Good luck with that.
</div>
</noscript>
...where all of the content in your site is wrapped with a div of class "pagecontainer". The CSS inside the noscript tag will then hide all of your page content, and instead display whatever "no JS" message you want to show. This is actually what Gmail appears to do...and if it's good enough for Google, it's good enough for my little site.
With HTML5 you can make file uploads with Ajax and jQuery. Not only that, you can do file validations (name, size, and MIME type) or handle the progress event with the HTML5 progress tag (or a div). Recently I had to make a file uploader, but I didn't want to use Flash nor Iframes or plugins and after some research I came up with the solution.
The HTML:
<form enctype="multipart/form-data">
<input name="file" type="file" />
<input type="button" value="Upload" />
</form>
<progress></progress>
First, you can do some validation if you want. For example, in the .on('change')
event of the file:
$(':file').on('change', function () {
var file = this.files[0];
if (file.size > 1024) {
alert('max upload size is 1k');
}
// Also see .name, .type
});
Now the $.ajax()
submit with the button's click:
$(':button').on('click', function () {
$.ajax({
// Your server script to process the upload
url: 'upload.php',
type: 'POST',
// Form data
data: new FormData($('form')[0]),
// Tell jQuery not to process data or worry about content-type
// You *must* include these options!
cache: false,
contentType: false,
processData: false,
// Custom XMLHttpRequest
xhr: function () {
var myXhr = $.ajaxSettings.xhr();
if (myXhr.upload) {
// For handling the progress of the upload
myXhr.upload.addEventListener('progress', function (e) {
if (e.lengthComputable) {
$('progress').attr({
value: e.loaded,
max: e.total,
});
}
}, false);
}
return myXhr;
}
});
});
As you can see, with HTML5 (and some research) file uploading not only becomes possible but super easy. Try it with Google Chrome as some of the HTML5 components of the examples aren't available in every browser.
Best Answer
There are a couple of options, but basically you need to do something like this:
In case it helps, I walk through a detailed example along these lines in my book, including sample code: Ultra-Fast ASP.NET.