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Comment by joehewitt | Hacker News Reader

It didn't take a seer to imagine that having camera access was a good idea, but it takes a pretty boneheaded committee to wait this long to do it. Hell, Adobe put camera access in Flash years before iOS even existed. I don't love Flash, but even they benefitted from have a single owner.

Lots of good things coming to the platform now, but progress was even faster in the mid-90's when Netscape and IE were growing up. IE4 and IE5 in particular had a lot of great features that have since been forgotten, and are only now being reconsidered for standardization. Remember behaviors, image filters, CSS expressions, and data binding?

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They had data binding? I don't remember that (that's a pet feature of mine ;)

From what I've seen, things don't really start in the committees. They start with people at browser vendors scratching their own itches and eventually escape out into the committees. In some ways, that's why it's good that there are 5 organizations pushing forward. One with an itch for camera access will help force the others to take action.

Data binding aside, I do remember the mid- to late-90s and I think the pace is faster now. Perhaps I'm biased since I work for a browser vendor... but I'm not actually a browser developer myself. I'm a web developer. And, I see interesting new capabilities popping up pretty rapidly.

Hell yeah, they had data binding in the 90's. Was ahead of its time, like XMLHttpRequest, but never caught on.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms531385(v=vs.85).as...

I realize that my reply didn't address the fact that camera access took a long time. You're right... I don't think it's because of a boneheaded committee, though. I'm just guessing, because I have nothing to do with this directly, but I'm guessing that people either:

1. weren't really thinking that the web needed camera access 2. thought there were higher priority things

And yes, Flash had camera access first. How's that working out for them relative to web technologies?

It gave us Chatroulette! :)

For years Flash held a dominate position on the web. Without Flash YouTube who knows how long it would have taken for something like YouTube to be created? That stagnation is a fundamental problem.

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