Can you do file IO using Javascript without ActiveX

Question

Can you do file input/output using Javascript without using ActiveX, submitting a form to a server, or other extensions?

The reason I ask is after hearing all about HTML5 I thought I might take the time to find out what all the hype is about but I can't see any way to create regular applications.

An example of what I thought I might be able to do would be to create a simple text editor in the browser using only HTML5 and Javascript, where I can open and save files from the disk. After that I was thinking to try and create some kind of icon editor using the canvas tag. But without any kind of file IO each example is rather pointless (in my opinion that is). So, is this possible? And if so how would I go about doing it?

Thank you!

Answer 1

Yes. See this Mozilla demo which extracts EXIF data from a local image. The W3C is developing an API .