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Show HN: DualShock calibration in the browser using WebHID

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Re: Show HN: DualShock calibration in the browser using WebHID

#81
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WebHID is work done under Web Platform Incubator Community Group, wicg. http://wicg.io There's tons of work done with this group, and it is very much a genuine, multi-party attempt to standardize out specs. I have a hard time believing this is an innocent mistake you've made, portraying such a stark "Google couldn't care less" dark-world fantasy. Over something very normal very boring and very commonly done by everyo…

> I have a hard time believing this is an innocent mistake you've made, portraying such a stark "Google couldn't care less" dark-world fantasy. This is literally the timeline: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/459

That's a great link. Even knowing Dmiitri as famously one of the most antagonistic negative people on the web, it's still a bad look. Someone jumping in to point out the team took >two years to do the work & turn it on also seems a lot less wild than much of the selectively portrayed versions.

As Google said in the comments there, they already knew there was strong opposition in principle to this spec, and that they wouldnt get cooperation advancing it, and hence didn't spend as much time doing spec work as they normally would have.

Chrome themselves seem very apologetic about it & to my knowledge this has not happened again.

The other huge missing piece of the picture here is that Chrome didn't write this spec de novo. A huge huge huge amount of the work in writing webhid is re exposing existing USB hid standards & data structures. There should still be a good web spec & this was a failure, but the team was wrapping something that's already very well defined & that they didn't have a ton of leeway to shape and change.

So no one was going to provide meaningful feedback (just, we won't work on this feedback), and the spec was already 3/4 set in stone before work started converting it to a web spec.

It's still a dark-world fantasy to me. And it's deceitful, brazenly incorrect, & full of slanted malice to say chrome isn't or even wasn't interested in standardizations. It's super dodgy quoting the spec saying this ain't a w3c spec as proof that the team doesn't care. That is, you citing, "not a W3C Standard nor is it on the W3C Standards Track." That's a epic & wild distortion, taking advantage of people's ignorance to make Chrome look bad when in fact using groups like https://wicg.io is how tons of amazing great work happens, is a place where all browsers have been bringing new work for a while. You'd have to say Safari and Mozilla don't care about the web too if you want to dump on Chrome here for using wicg to standardize.

Re: Show HN: DualShock calibration in the browser using WebHID

#82
post #8

[flagged]

I am a Firefox diehard. Also a web dev. As such I agree that Firefox refusing to implement things like WebSerial and WebHID is shooting themselves in the foot, and will only drive more users towards Blink. You could have made your point in a less inflammatory way, though.

FWIW Mozilla updated their position on Web Serial API to "neutral" and clarified that they might be okay with enabling the API with an add-on.

https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#webserial

Allowing serial but not HID would be really strange. With HID you get standard identifiers that let you filter out devices that are too dangerous for the web. With serial you get nothing. Even if you know a device is dangerous, there's no way to protect users from it.

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