How to avoid global variables in JavaScript?

The easiest way is to wrap your code in a closure and manually expose only those variables you need globally to the global scope:

(function() {
    // Your code here

    // Expose to global
    window['varName'] = varName;
})();

To address Crescent Fresh’s comment: in order to remove global variables from the scenario entirely, the developer would need to change a number of things assumed in the question. It would look a lot more like this:

Javascript:

(function() {
    var addEvent = function(element, type, method) {
        if('addEventListener' in element) {
            element.addEventListener(type, method, false);
        } else if('attachEvent' in element) {
            element.attachEvent('on' + type, method);

        // If addEventListener and attachEvent are both unavailable,
        // use inline events. This should never happen.
        } else if('on' + type in element) {
            // If a previous inline event exists, preserve it. This isn't
            // tested, it may eat your baby
            var oldMethod = element['on' + type],
                newMethod = function(e) {
                    oldMethod(e);
                    newMethod(e);
                };
        } else {
            element['on' + type] = method;
        }
    },
        uploadCount = 0,
        startUpload = function() {
            var fil = document.getElementById("FileUpload" + uploadCount);

            if(!fil || fil.value.length == 0) {    
                alert("Finished!");
                document.forms[0].reset();
                return;
            }

            disableAllFileInputs();
            fil.disabled = false;
            alert("Uploading file " + uploadCount);
            document.forms[0].submit();
        };

    addEvent(window, 'load', function() {
        var frm = document.forms[0];

        frm.target = "postMe";
        addEvent(frm, 'submit', function() {
            startUpload();
            return false;
        });
    });

    var iframe = document.getElementById('postHere');
    addEvent(iframe, 'load', function() {
        uploadCount++;
        if(uploadCount > 1) {
            startUpload();
        }
    });

})();

HTML:

<iframe src="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1841916/test.htm" name="postHere" id="postHere"></iframe>

You don’t need an inline event handler on the <iframe>, it will still fire on each load with this code.

Regarding the load event

Here is a test case demonstrating that you don’t need an inline onload event. This depends on referencing a file (/emptypage.php) on the same server, otherwise you should be able to just paste this into a page and run it.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
    <title>untitled</title>
</head>
<body>
    <script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
        (function() {
            var addEvent = function(element, type, method) {
                if('addEventListener' in element) {
                    element.addEventListener(type, method, false);
                } else if('attachEvent' in element) {
                    element.attachEvent('on' + type, method);

                    // If addEventListener and attachEvent are both unavailable,
                    // use inline events. This should never happen.
                } else if('on' + type in element) {
                    // If a previous inline event exists, preserve it. This isn't
                    // tested, it may eat your baby
                    var oldMethod = element['on' + type],
                    newMethod = function(e) {
                        oldMethod(e);
                        newMethod(e);
                    };
                } else {
                    element['on' + type] = method;
                }
            };

            // Work around IE 6/7 bug where form submission targets
            // a new window instead of the iframe. SO suggestion here:
            // http://stackoverflow.com/q/875650
            var iframe;
            try {
                iframe = document.createElement('<iframe name="postHere">');
            } catch (e) {
                iframe = document.createElement('iframe');
                iframe.name="postHere";
            }

            iframe.name="postHere";
            iframe.id = 'postHere';
            iframe.src="https://stackoverflow.com/emptypage.php";
            addEvent(iframe, 'load', function() {
                alert('iframe load');
            });

            document.body.appendChild(iframe);

            var form = document.createElement('form');
            form.target="postHere";
            form.action = "https://stackoverflow.com/emptypage.php";
            var submit = document.createElement('input');
            submit.type="submit";
            submit.value="Submit";

            form.appendChild(submit);

            document.body.appendChild(form);
        })();
    </script>
</body>
</html>

The alert fires every time I click the submit button in Safari, Firefox, IE 6, 7 and 8.

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