Reading the justification for WebHID I get the feeling I’m missing something:
> There is a long tail of human interface devices (HIDs) that are too new, too old, or too uncommon to be accessible by systems' device drivers. The WebHID API solves this by providing a way to implement device-specific logic in JavaScript.
> (...)
> The inability to access uncommon or unusual HID devices is particularly painful, for example, when it comes to gamepad support. Gamepad inputs and outputs are not well standardized and web browsers often require custom logic for specific devices. This is unsustainable and results in poor support for the long tail of older and uncommon devices.
So instead of only having to implement support for these devices once (in the browser), they now expect every website that would need support for these kind of devices to write their own code to handle all these ‘long tail’ input devices ?
How does that not make the problem infinitely worse ?
Instead of convincing one party to implement and support the code to handle your obscure HID, now you beee to convince potentially millions of websites. All running different implementations with their own unique bugs and issues.
This sounds less like an effort from the Chrome team to add support for these devices and more like a way to make it someone else’s problem.