Todd, I just wanted to stress that there is NO way for PHP to access
anything on the client. The way you wrote it, you sort of implied
that there might be other ways:
"PHP by itself cannot access the local file system in a way that
allows ..."
That's all.
The above is saying two different things.
1). "PHP by itself cannot access the local file system" <-- true.
2) "... there is NO way for PHP to access anything on the client."
<-- not true.
Statement 2 _is_ 100% true. Sorry, end of discussion for my part.
Technically statement 2 is not true, a PHP framework/platform such as NOLOH (http://www.noloh.com), allows you to access all client properties seamlessly and transparently from PHP, with something like NOLOH you don't have to worry about the client at all.