On 07/16/2014 02:03 PM, Dave Hylands wrote:
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.
AIUI the Raspberry Pi/BeagleBone Black/Arduino have GPIO pins that may be hooked up to shields or custom things done by the user and not generic RS232 ports. It seems like in the mapping/definition process, usable identifiers/metadata could be provided that could in turn be surfaced into Firefox/Firefox OS so that authorization could be done in terms of specific things. If there is some emerging serial meta-data protocol so that Firefox OS can send some bytes over the serial port and have the serial port report back what's connected, that's even better.
For example: "Do you want to allow http://superblinkylights.example.org access to you NeoPixel Shield?"
I do agree that it would make sense to lump this under the auspices of WebSerial. I think my main point is just that the UX and permissions needs to be about the devices/endpoints. This also seems desirable since otherwise you potentially have to have every app/webpage being smart enough not to use the serial ports that are not hooked up to what it actually wants to talk to.
One possibility for this would be for the WebSerial API to have a super-dangerous API surface (that requires app store/configuration pain) and the friendly/safe API. A limited utility app with the super-dangerous permission helps the user define what the random non-self-describing serial ports on their system are. Then all the random "show a pretty LED light show on your arduino" app can still just ask for the "NeoPixel" serial protocol/etc.
Andrew _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
