"Legacy RS232" ports on PC motherboards are probably not that important.
But phones, and devices like the Raspberry Pi, and BeagleBone Black, also have "native" serial ports (i.e. non-USB, non-Bluetooth), and the people that use these types of devices are the very one which are extremely frustrated by the lack of support for access to serial. So don't assume that the web is only used from a PC. Dave Hylands ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Andrew Sutherland" <asutherl...@asutherland.org> > To: "Jonas Sicking" <jo...@sicking.cc>, "Alexandros Chronopoulos" > <achro...@gmail.com>, "Daniel Veditz" <dved...@mozilla.com> > Cc: "dev-platform" <dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org> > Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2014 12:01:19 PM > Subject: Re: Intent to implement: webserial api > On 07/13/2014 11:55 AM, Jonas Sicking wrote: > > Sadly I don't think that is very safe. I bet a significant majority of our > > users have no idea what a serial port is or what will happen if they allow > > a website to connect to it. > Agreed. It seems like the concept users are most likely to reliably > understand are physical devices. > https://github.com/whatwg/serial/issues/23 indicates that that the > expected supported underlying layers are USB, Bluetooth, and the random > motherboard that still has RS232 ports. As noted in a comment on issue > 20 at https://github.com/whatwg/serial/issues/20#issuecomment-28333090 > it seems counterproductive to place so much importance on the legacy case. > I think an important statement for the spec to make is why it needs to > exist at all? Specifically, it seems like both the WebUSB > https://bugzil.la/674718 and WebBluetooth https://bugzil.la/674737 specs > should both be equally capable of producing the standard stream > abstractions supported by the protocols. > And then the security and UX can both benefit from the appropriate > models. This includes features that the WebSerial API currently can't > really offer, like triggering a notification/wake-up/load of the app > when the device is reconnected via USB or comes into range of the > device, etc. This is arguably a net UX win. Additionally, if the > security model involved enumerating vendor/product, not only would it > simplify the wake-up notification, but the Firefox OS app marketplace > could even suggest apps. (Ex: a system notification could notice you > plugged in a specific vendor/product pair for the first time and offer > to launch a search. Or tell you what it already found, etc.) > Note that I'm not saying the spec/implementation doesn't need to exist. > However I do think that from a security/user comprehension perspective > WebUSB/WebBluetooth should handle the friendly/easy-to-use stuff and > WebSerial needs to be something that needs to be vouched-for by a > marketplace or requires the user performing a series of manual steps > that would make most people think twice about why they're doing it. > Andrew > _______________________________________________ > dev-platform mailing list > dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
