Localhost web-app. Get full path to file in browser
One approach is to communicate with your server; your client would start with the path "home" (or empty string) and the server would return the physical path ("c:\users\me" or "/home/me"), and the list of subfolders and files in the folder... And then if you give any other path to the server, it will return you info about that other path. The tricky part would be to get notified when new mounts or drives appear in the the system (usb keys and so on).
Then you could make a file picker in the client using that information that the fully-privileged server gives you. Actually with the proper JS libraries it wouldn't be that hard to code, and it is being done by various projects, the problem (besides the extra work) being that your file picker will look out of place compared to the system file picker that users are used to.
My question may seem strange, I'd love suggestions if you have a better way to go about what I'm doing:
I'm running a local web server with the Bottle web framework for python. I'm using jQuery, HTML, and CSS to write the graphical front end to my "app", and just navigating to the address of the local host in a browser (firefox).
I'm doing this because I want the flexibility that html and css offer for designing UIs over the abilities offered by tools like QT, and PyQt. 
Here's the problem:
An important part of my app is to obtain the full path to a file on disk which the program will operate on. So as to not make the user type the full path the entire time, I'd love to have a file selection dialogue fill it in for them. However, I've been reading that for security reasons, the browser will not allow that full path to come through.
I understand that the full path to a file would never be useful in a normal server-client set up, but in this case the server and client are one in the same, and I'm not concerned with that aspect of security.
Am I approaching this problem in a silly way? Is there a way to ask the file browser to return the full path to a file it is selecting? Or do I need to find another path entirely?
Thanks!
Murphy