Re: http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-html-media-capture-20120712/ ( LC-2644)

Hi NN,  

On Friday, 14 September 2012 at 10:51, NN Murthy wrote:

> I disagree on lack of strong use cases. On desktops, most popular mechanism
> to capture images (either documents or photographs) is using document
> scanners rather than cameras.

Can you provide a citation for the above? I only found old articles dating back to 2003:
http://www.infotrends.com/public/Content/Press/2003/06.03.2003.html 

It would be good to see if that trend has declined or not. 

I also found this bit of research related to businesses and scanners, thought it is about "perception" and not so much about actual documents scanned (perception was that there was an increase, though survey sample size is not given):
http://www.infotrends.com/public/Content/Press/2011/03.30.2011b.html

If you have any conclusive evidence, it would be helpful. 
> You can consider whether it is possible if a
> desk top is having a document scanner and not camera but HTML form mentions
> capture="camera", whether the browser can invoke document scanner.

Why can't the system just do this? Camera is a camera, even if it's a scanner (i.e., the scanner should advertise itself as a camera to the system). I imagine something like this:

<Click here to take a picture> ==> pick from (quickcam) (scanner) (other camera thing) (etc.)

As long as something says it's a camera (it doesn't matter what "it" is - could be scanner, biometric sensor, electron microscope, MRI scanner, etc.), then the system would treat it as one. 
> 
> Similarly biometrics is becoming more and more important for authentication,
> be it on ATM machines, or be it a whole lot of government applications.
> People are talking of biometrics even to access their own personal devices.

Again, do you have any numbers that show the prevalence of biometric sensors? I've seen them on a few laptops and random keyboards - but I am not aware of those things being mainstream. 
> In view of such interest already web services are defined to access
> biometric devices
> (http://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/ig/upload/NIST-SP-500-288-v1.pdf). In most of
> the instances the devices actually give images and if we can provide such a
> facility through this specification, we will be helping a large number of
> web based applications.

For the above, you don't need any kind of special picker: it's a web service, so presumedly you could do everything over XHR? 

Kind regards,
Marcos

Received on Friday, 14 September 2012 11:20:48 UTC